Pixels in the Night
by starofoberon
Summary: He built the Machine. She wants to hack it. Mm, sounds like the beginning of a perfect relationship to me.
1. First Contact

**A/N **I own neither of these shows. Sure wish I did! I'm aware that some of the backstory for Person of Interest may change as the show continues to dribble out clues about things. I'm working with the most recent information I have.

**Pixels in the Night **

**Chapter One**

**First Contact**

Washington, D.C.

This is how boring Penelope Garcia's night had been so far: When an acquaintance sent her a dumb joke (it involved tits and sausage) with a completely lame punchline, accent on the PUN (_"It was the breast of times, it was the wurst of times"_), she actually hit Reply and typed _lol,_ _good one carla_, rather than just sighing, "Oh, cripes," and slamming her right ring finger down hard on the Delete key.

Her Team was off in Biloxi, Mississippi, and safely bedded down for the night. Kevin had left an hour ago for the night shift in White Collar Crime. The laundry was done and folded; the putting-away could wait for morning.

What she wanted to do, she could not do until close to midnight.

She checked her computer's clock for the fourteenth time. 11:34.

_Come on!_

What people tended to forget about Garcia, perhaps misled by her troll dolls, plush animals, and silly toys, wearing her big heart on her brightly hued sleeve, was that she was genuinely dangerous.

She had proved so valuable and so dedicated at her job that she had actually become an active part of the Team, presenting cases, even interviewing some tech-savvy victims and suspects. Alone of all the FBI's technical analysts, she had her own Kevlar vest and had been known to enter a hot crime scene to negotiate with a suspect. She was passionate about her job and passionate about justice.

This was in spite of the fact that, like Frank Abagnale, she had been given a choice: Work for us, or spend your life in a federal prison. Penelope Garcia had, in her early twenties, been one of the four most dangerous hackers in the world.

In the _world._

The powers-that-be had expressed gratitude that she was working on _their_ side.

She knew that the aforementioned powers were monitoring all telephone calls, all email, potentially the billions of GPS pings per second that cell phones, PDAs—everything portable and digital—emitted all day, every day. She knew that it was getting harder and harder to avoid showing up on any surveillance cameras, which had become ubiquitous.

She didn't get all Big-Brother-y about it; her attitude was, _Great, you have the data. Good luck trying to __sort it all out, let alone analyze it._

It would take some kind of freaking genius to do it, and it would take years.

So it was out there, all that data, probably lumped into general categories like _Dayton Ohio cell phones 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM_, and slammed into folders unread like some digital version of the hoarders she saw on cable TV.

For Garcia, it was a game, partly the joy of a puzzle and partly the pride of a wild western gunfighter._ Build your uncrackable database and I will crack it. Construct your impermeable firewall and I will permeate it, baby; I will dance right through it…just to show you_—_and myself_—_that I can_.

So when she sensed the presence of a massive database sucking up input from just about everywhere, a database with industrial-strength firewalls, she obviously also sensed the challenge. The fact that the massive database was almost certainly the property of the NSA, one of the organizations keeping her employed, did nothing to dissuade her from trying her best to punch just a little bitty hole in it, just to prove that she could.

Something happened around midnight every night, something that teased at her inner hacker, that told her she was a layer closer to what she sought.

Time check: 11:47 PM.

She tapped in a few commands.

_Game on, dudes._

**~ o ~**

New York City

The older man removed his glasses. He rubbed his eyes, massaged his temples, and sighed. He took a sip of tea, now grown cool, but still flavorful. He was exhausted, but obsessively he checked one last time. He sighed, studied his computer monitor, and typed in another command.

Officially, his surname was "Finch," and since the only person he had permitted to get anywhere nearly close to him only knew his first name from another of his identities, as "Harold," he accepted that from him rather than try to correct him, which would just send him guessing again…and John Reese was a very good guesser. So, OK, he was "Harold Finch." He could live with that.

In another life, with another name—and he'd had, he _still_ had, dozens of names—he had been considered, well, a freaking genius. Over the space of several years, he had designed and built The Machine, a massive program capable of not only gathering all data from email, from blogs, from cell phone usage, from constant GPS pings from a billion users, but also sorting through that tsunami of data, matching it up with face-recognition software, and then analyzing it. It was an impossibly huge program, some aspects of it still technically in beta phase, now running on some impossibly huge multi-acre server farm somewhere, churning out security threats and identifying potential terrorists on a moment by-moment basis.

Only eight people outside a very small cadre within the Agency had known of The Machine's existence, and only one of them knew that he had built it. All of them were dead—the man whom people believed to have been the creator, and all of his associates—and all in manners that were believable. A heart attack here, an auto accident there. A suicide. A stroke. All so sad, so tragic. So credible.

The powers-that-be had seen to that, had recognized the danger of some damn civilian surrendering its secrets, either for profit or under duress. They had anticipated the shitstorm of outrage that would erupt if its existence were to become known to the general public.

But the man whose closest associate knew him as Harold Finch was about the most paranoid sonofabitch you were likely to find, in this world or any other.

Which was why regardless of his first name, Finch would remain Finch, and the man that he had once been would remain dead, lest the Agency discover that not only had it missed the most critical civilian to wipe out, but he had managed to take most of his billions with him. If they found that he was still alive, they would have the assassination done again, and this time they would get it right.

He typed in a few more commands and moved closer, in terms of cyberspace, to the outer limits of The Machine. Somebody—somebody frighteningly good—had been sniffing around his little back door to The Machine lately. Not often, just once or twice, but the appearance had troubled him. Like many natural-born programmers, he had started as a hacker. He recognized the intruder's moves as those of someone who would not give up, _just because._

When his only friend, the assassin, had claimed that a certain crime had been carried out in a certain manner, and he knew that because _that's how I would have done it_, Finch accepted that easily. He felt the same way about his hacker problem. He knew what he or she would do, because that's how—and why—_he_ would have done it.

Midnight was fast approaching.

There it was. Someone had access to a peripheral file area adjacent to the NSA feed. It wasn't inside, far from it, but still closer than he wanted anyone to get to figuring out how much was there.

_Damn._

While he scrambled to identify the intruder's IP address, he moved to meet the intruder on his own terms. He entered a few characters, opening up a tiny dialog box—a little program of his own design—next to his command prompt and over to the right a bit. He chose the letters VoD, standing for Voice of Doom (an old in-joke), as his identifier. Only he and the intruder could see it. If they really wanted to read the dialog box they could access it.

$Z ^ Open di_LOG3.04

_user=VoD says:_ Go away

To his surprise, rather than fleeing backward or charging forward, the intruder selected the option to provide a name for himself…or herself, of course. But most hackers were male. It was an aggressive drive, a masculine behavior.

_user=just_me says:_ why?

That was just as well, since it gave him more time to trace the intruder's IP address, and he was racing against the clock here.

_user=VoD says:_ Doesn't matter. Just go.

The intruder evidently wanted to play. Fine. He almost had the creep now, and he was running out of time. His fingers flew.

_user=just_me says:_ does matter. why?

_user=VoD says: _Go. Now. It isn't safe for you.

After only a slight hesitation, _user=just_me_ left the area.

That instant's hesitation gave Finch, who had never lost his hacker chops, the opportunity to complete a connection that startled the living hell out of him. He almost forgot to check for any number (there was none tonight) that The Machine might leak to him.

He sat there for several minutes staring at his screen and sipping cold tea, trying to make sense out of what he saw there.

_Oh, my._

_What on earth am I to make of this?_

**~ o ~**

Washington, D. C.

_Well, that was weird._

Penelope decided to call it a night with things computer-related. She backed out of all her programs and set the machine to go into defrag mode in her absence.

Then she shrugged into a faux-fur jacket, grabbed her purse and her phone and her tablet and headed out into the night for a four-block walk, at the end of which would be a double caramel frappuccino at Longtime Louie's.

She still was not quite sure why she left the area when VoD warned her off. In part, of course, because nobody had ever, ever opened up a dialog box and warned her off anything before. That the warning had been crisp and precise, punctuated, proper use of caps, and completely free of even common contractions on networking sites (_Not safe 4 u_, for instance) had triggered instant interpretations of "mature adult" and "professional." Both of those identifiers tended to suggest the the speaker knew what he/she was talking about.

Once she was snuggled into a corner of a booth at a pretty-much-empty Louie's, tablet out and hooked in to the wi-fi, she started in with the rest of the questions.

What was that little app that VoD had opened up? And what the hell did VoD stand for? The lower-case "o" was almost certainly "of," as in, for example, Department of Defense. Legion of Doom. Prisoner of Azkaban. Lords of Discipline.

The "D" had to be Death, Danger, Doom, Destruction, Defiance—something intended as threatening. But the "V"? Vigilantes, maybe. Or Vampires. Vampires were big then, although zombies were bigger. Vipers. Victors. Vassals. Virgins.

The Virgins of Destruction.

_Oh, you definitely need to call it a night, girl..._


	2. Replication

****A/N ****I own neither of these shows. Sure wish I did! I'm aware that some of the backstory for Person of Interest may change as the show continues to dribble out clues about things. I'm working with the most recent information I have.**  
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**Pixels in the Night **

**Chapter Two**

**Replication**

Washington, D.C.

It was almost midnight. Kevin had left for night shift at White Collar Crime. The dishes were washed and put away. Penelope had lightened her hair in streaks, dried it, and approved of the new look. Now she sat at her computer, ready to rock and roll.

She had something that she felt was akin to synesthesia. Like synesthetes, who heard colors or smelled sounds or felt numbers, or experienced other random crossed wires of the senses, she saw and felt computer programs as palpable objects, with soft spots and hard points and shadows and reflected light. Where others—Bruce Sterling, for example, in his early book on the phenomenon of hacking—had described the way software worked as nearly theological, she saw it as purely organic.

There'd been a time when she'd dismissed the flesh-and-blood end-users of programs she had either designed or tweaked as "squishware." The programs—the warez—were everything, more robust (and certainly more dependable) than the squishware that ran it.

She still maintained ties to the hacker community; still browsed the Usenet sites and weird little low-tech local retro bulletin boards where they still posted their work product, from the lovable to the lethal.

The day after her initial encounter, she'd spent most of her free time among various ad hoc online bazaars for that weird little program that VoD had deployed to scare her off. If she could identify what it was and where he was likely to have acquired it, if she could find the dudes who were supplying it and/or the programmer who created it, she was that much closer to finding the son of a bitch who had tried to scare her away.

So—what the hell program was it? She had spent an hour or so strolling through the warez offerings, first the legal, then the not-so-, then the emphatically il-, looking for something that fit the way "di_LOG3.04" worked.

No luck. Nothing even remotely like it.

When programmers and engineers confronted glitches in their programs, when they poked this little button or command and something went totally haywire, one of the first things they did (after saying "whoops") was try to do it again. A phenomenon that couldn't be replicated was one kind of problem. One that they could make happen again was something else.

And she wanted to see if VoD was…replicable.

As the witching hour approached, cybernetically speaking, she tiptoed out into the area that VoD had chased her out of the night before.

_Pow._

That frickin' dialog box was back.

_ $Z ^ Open di_LOG3.04_

_user=VoD says:_ Back off

_He-e-e-e-e-re we go again_, she thought with a sigh of satisfaction. She tapped a key and got her IP tracking programs flying at her problem.

She tabbed over to the dialog box and typed in her nice neutral username.

_user=just_me says:_ why?

The response came instantly.

_user=VoD says: _Back off, Tech Analyst Garcia

Her eyes popped open wide, huge. Hairs stood up on the back of her neck. She was not about to let that one pass. Trying to continue to sound (well, _look_) calm, she typed:

_user=just_me says:_ why do you call me that?

_user=VoD says:_ It's your name, Penelope, now go away

She all but turned off the machine in her backing away. Anything to break the connection.

_Holy fuck, I am so out of there._

It wasn't just the use of her own name. It was the use of her title. Getting into personal trouble was one thing. Dragging the Bureau into it was another matter.

She shut down her machine completely, engaged all of her security programs, both for the computer and for her apartment. She grabbed an older laptop from the refurb shelf as she left, hoping to take another run at the dude from a different IP.

Once she was out of her building, she called Kevin at White Collar Crime, and said, "Listen, I'm really upset and I'm walking down to Longtime Louie's for a frapp. I'll call you as soon as I get there. If I don't call you in ten minutes, call the police."

"The police? Pen, what's going on?"

_Good Lord, should not have called Kev! He panics so easily …_

But _damn_ that guy was good…knew her name and title. She should probably report it. Her hands began to tremble as she considered what she might say…and to whom.

_Been a long time since I've been in trouble. It isn't much fun any more._

**~ o ~**

New York City

"He's a retired civil engineer," the alleged Harold Finch told the alleged John Reese. "Active in VFW, Toastmasters, an avid golfer. His finances look reasonable, no criminal record. House in Queens completely paid for, lives with his wife of forty-seven years, she's also retired and volunteers in a hospital gift shop twenty hours a week. They look like a lovely couple," he added wistfully.

Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to be part of a couple, to have another half. As much as the fear of surrendering control frightened him, the notion of having someone whom he could trust utterly haunted him. A life of secrets, however, must by necessity be a lonely one.

"I'll get right on it," the man who currently functioned as his other half said, and vanished down the stairs of the abandoned library that Finch called home.

When Mr. Finch turned his attention to his sea of databases, he took just a moment to scan the area where he had confronted that lovely young woman from the FBI earlier that evening.

Someone was there again, not thumping heavy-handedly at it, like a couple of the honchos at the NSA who were tasked with cracking The Machine and seemed to feel brute force was the answer to everything, but sniffing here and there, almost delicately.

Daintily.

He checked Penelope Garcia's IP address. She was not his visitor.

Hmm.

He watched a while longer, distracted from the race to protect the retired civil engineer for a moment.

What was the likelihood that two separate people would prowl the same area of cyberspace with the same sort of delicacy?

Finch calculated those odds and went with them. When he was a frightened child, when most of his peers were learning their alphabet and colors and the names of farm animals, he had figured out that most of life was a lie, but that _numbers_ never lied.

With confidence he opened his little program again.

_ $Z ^ Open di_LOG3.04_

_user=VoD says:_ Move away, Garcia. Nothing to see there.

After a moment, the trespasser took the bait again, but chose another name.

_user=I_am_no_man says:_ and how would you know

_OK, the IP address is still in her area. She has underestimated me._

Which was no surprise. People had underestimated "Harold Finch" all his life. At first, it had caused him pain. Now, he found security in the anonymity of underestimation. It was easier to hide if you weren't extraordinary.

Gently, one tiny command at a time, he forced the intruder's computer into a P2P relationship with his own.

_user=VoD says:_ _Because nobody gets close enough to verify. You have trust issues Garcia._

Her answer came immediately.

_user=I_am_no_man says: you're pretty quick to judge aren't you, mystery dude_

He shot an explosion of random data at her hard drive, nothing that would cause it damage, but enough that it would send her firewalls and virus protection programs into hissy fits for at least a few minutes.

It was a pity she had a boyfriend, a fair hacker himself. Harold Finch had checked him out, too. He thought Kevin was a little too immature for Penelope, whose online footprint showed depth and heart and dazzling sophistication.

She was cute, too.

"Finch?" Reese said over their connection. "He's on the move already, he's heading east toward the rail station, and I'm still five minutes away. Can you get their eyes for me?"

"On it," Finch replied, effortlessly capturing the LIRR surveillance video feeds. "He isn't showing yet—wait, his car's entering the lot, got him, Mr. Reese."

As he centered his attention on the movements of their current person of interest, who was, according to The Machine, either the potential victim or a perpetrator preparing to strike, in the background he sent two recent images of Penelope Garcia—her BAU ID photo and her current profile picture on Facebook—to his printer.

Definitely cute.

And smart. And nothing made Harold Finch's knees go weak like a really smart, confident girl.


	3. Hide and Seek

**A/N **I own neither of these shows. Sure wish I did! I'm aware that some of the backstory for Person of Interest may change as the show continues to dribble out clues about things. I'm working with the most recent information I have.

**Pixels in the Night **

**Chapter Three**

**Hide and Seek**

Washington, D.C.

At a back table at Longtime Louie's, Penelope Garcia felt kind of like one of those guys booted out of a saloon in old westerns; like she'd just flown through the air, out the swinging doors, and was now sitting on her butt in the middle of the street and wondering what the hell had happened.

At least there were no virtual townspeople to gawk at her—just Hannah the waitress, joking around with the only other customer in the place, and Tim, who acted like any grad student using Longtime Louie's as a paying gig, but was actually Lou Rogoff's son. Garcia'd checked him out early on.

She watched the outdated laptop she'd randomly snagged from her refurb shelf grind and fuss and bitch about the data surging onto her hard drive. When it settled down, she set her fingers to flying and ran right back toward the place she'd been before. Finding out how he'd managed to load that crap onto her laptop was an issue that could wait until she had stalked VoD to his pathetic little lair.

Where are you, you lousy SOB?

As she got within a few layers of where she'd been, a familiar item flashed onto her screen.

_ $Z ^ Open di_LOG3.04_

_user=VoD says:_ Back so soon, Ms. Garcia?

Her fingers flew.

_user=wtf says_: wtf was that?

_user=VoD says_: Just covering your tracks, Penelope. I'll do it again if I have to.

She busied herself in the background trying to trace where "VoD" was coming from, while busying _him_ with conversation.

_user=wtf says_: you're threatening me?

_user=VoD says_: I'm promising you that for now I'll help you camouflage the fact that you were here. Come no closer. If you persist, I can't promise I'll always be here to shield you.

She grimaced at her screen. What a god complex! What a condescending asshole!

_user=wtf says_: so you're like this noble knight saving me from the big scary dragon?

There was a measurable pause, the first hesitation she had yet observed in VoD's online behavior. That gave her extra time to trace him—and it was a male, she was sure—back through Canada, Switzerland, the Maldives, Hungary, Taiwan, and Paraguay (_just the itty-bittiest bit paranoid, are we, VoD?_) in search of his IP address.

_user=VoD says_: You have no idea how big or how scary.

Yeah, yeah, she thought to herself as she continued furiously to track back over the trail of virtual breadcrumbs he'd left.

_Got him._

_user=wtf says_: ok fine i'm going, byeeeee

She closed the dialog box. She'd been connected to a computer associated with Molyneaux, Jay, and Fritts, a Staten Island IT company. She shut down the connection; she would do her research about the company and its employees from another computer at another time.

_What a jerkass…._

**~ o ~**

New York City

"Not sure what's going on here," the man who called himself John Reese reported from an inbound LIRR train, "but he's definitely looking around like he's expecting to meet someone."

"Working on it," the man who called himself Harold Finch assured his partner, negotiating his way through a blizzard of options to find the particular car that Reese and their target were occupying. "I have you now, behind the large Latina in the bright red coat."

Reese raised his eyes, located the camera—and as always, it was as though he were looking straight at Harold, and Finch half-expected him to wink—and nodded slightly across the aisle to his right.

Their person of interest sat awkwardly, his hands gripping his kneecaps, but every time there was movement in the aisles he glanced up with an expression of apprehension on his face.

Eyes-on surveillance wasn't usually part of Finch's job description—that was Reese's place—so Finch turned his attention again to his data streams, searching for the connection between their civil engineer and whoever wanted to kill him. Or whoever he wanted to kill, of course.

The Machine read intent with remarkable accuracy, but it never spat out any data other than a Social Security number, not even information on whether the number was a potential perp or a potential victim. This was critical to its security; any other information might give clues to specific algorithms it employed to make its predictions. Knowledge of its algorithms might make entry into its black-box system more nearly possible, so no living person was to know them.

(Except for Finch, of course, who'd developed and programmed those algorithms, sometimes working for 35, 40 hours at a stretch on a vacant floor of the corporate headquarters of the software behemoth he'd founded and still—quietly, shielded by layers of holding companies— owned. But even Finch just got the SSN and had to run with it, just like the NSA with the numbers of potential terrorists that the machine spewed to them as needed.)

Finch turned from the civil engineer's work history to his social history, scanning dozens of pictures of happy people at corporate and family reunions. From time to time he raised his gaze to the silent eyes of the LIRR video surveillance cameras, or checked to ensure that the enchanting Ms. Garcia hadn't come back for a rematch.

She'd already left Longtime Louie's. He'd saved the footage he hijacked from a Georgetown traffic camera, a vision in swirling paisleys and a faux fur jacket of a hue not seen in nature, as she strode down the street. He wasn't sure he got the teetering heels, though. Attractive they were, certainly, even downright erotic, but—not sensible. Risky.

Some would argue that her online behavior was risky, too—but it isn't risky if you know what you're doing, and there was no doubt that Ms. Garcia knew exactly what she was doing.

His gaze shot up to his screens again, eyes wide behind his thick glasses. "Mr. Reese," he said, his voice tense. "Young man who just entered, fatigue jacket, gym bag?"

"Got him," Reese replied.

"He's the granddaughter's boyfriend," Finch said. "The girl who's in rehab."

Finch and Reese never troubled each other any more with trifles like _Are you sure?_ Their level of trust was solid down to the atomic level.

"Charles Glenn Mahle. He's nineteen," Finch continued, surging through databases in much the same way that Ms. Garcia did. "No job, no fixed address, can't reach Carter, but he's been in rehab twice so we can assume there's a drug problem…."

**~ o ~**

Washington, D.C.

She should have gone to bed, but she was mad, damn it.

She opened a third computer—at any given moment, she had a couple dozen that ran and a couple dozen more to tweak until they did—and began to swim upstream into the Molyneaux, Jay, and Fritts table of organization until she found what she was looking for. Molyneaux had retired, Fritts was the business end of the outfit.

Harold F. Jay, however, was listed as their senior programmer. A timid-looking guy, in his late forties, early fifties, with thick glasses and sideburns from the 70s, smiled awkwardly at the camera in his official corporate portrait. Theoretically, of course, she could have been talking to any code jockey in the company, but this guy was good, he was creative, and he was as precise as only an older guy was likely to be.

She almost went looking for the real deal, but she decided instead to do a little research on her topic first, data-mining the crap out of Harold F. Jay.

All sources seemed to agree that he was just shy of his fiftieth birthday, a graduate of MIT, former faculty at CMU, and now a founding partner in MJ&F. Single, childless, evidently no real life outside his job—not a surprising phenomenon among older programmers, in Garcia's experience—no criminal record, not even a parking ticket. No driver's license, either, not for New York State nor anywhere else. He had an apartment not far from his office, so probably walked to work.

He had a license for a neutered male beagle-mix named "Reese."

Social media pages for several people with similar names all proved to be the wrong guy. Her target instead subscribed to a few speculative technical blogs, upon which he commented very rarely—but always with penetrating intelligence. His dog—or some other agreeably goofy-looking mostly-beagle—was his avatar of choice when he posted.

Bypassing trivialities like search warrants, she delved into Harold Jay's finances (a bit shaky, considering he had a stake in the company)—his email (almost exclusively bland and boring business exchanges, with the occasional mildly politically incorrect joke)—his military record (two uneventful years as a company clerk, mostly at Fort Polk)—and his work product (he held patents on three minor database clients and an early video game).

She looked all of this over, sighed, and frowned. It was wrong, all of it. Even the early video game was a solid job, workmanlike, but without flair.

This was not the man she had met near that explosion of data. The man she had met the last two nights might or might not be a freaking genius, but he had flair to spare.

**~ o ~**

New York City

Harold Finch sat back in his office chair and sighed.

When the civil engineer had connected with his granddaughter, the one who was supposed to be in rehab, but had managed to get free and meet her grandpa on the inbound LIRR, Reese followed the couple—well, more accurately followed her scruffy boyfriend, Charles, who was following the engineer and his granddaughter—down dark streets, always with Harold in his ear.

That was the hardest part for Harold. Although he trusted Mr. Reese's extraordinary skills, he always felt helpless when there was nothing for him to contribute.

He did take the time to check in and confirm that Ms. Garcia had taken the Molyneaux, Jay, and Fritts bait. That _should_ keep her occupied for at least a few hours. He'd had that identity for nine years now—letting Fritts pretty much run the place while "Harold Jay" checked in via email every few days. "Mr. Jay" had always worked off-site, programming from his home and teleconferencing in as needed.

Maintaining his dozens of identities was a maddening but crucial time-suck in his day-to-day existence. It wasn't that time-consuming—all but a couple top-level IDs worked from home and communicated principally via email—but sometimes, when they were hot on the trail of a new person of interest, he hated to surrender even the few minutes it took.

He heard Mr. Reese connect with Detective Fusco, one of their NYPD contacts. Heard the discussion of Charles's record, of his known associates. Of the bar where he hung out that was in the direction the engineer was headed.

He heard shots. Heard a young woman cursing, loudly and repetitively. Heard John Reese reassuring the retired civil engineer. Heard approaching sirens.

"Well done, Mr. Reese," he murmured into his connection. He didn't know the details, but it was clear that once again, his ex-Special Forces, ex-CIA confederate had taken out the trash and saved the good guys.

Finally able to disconnect part of his attention from the ongoing drama, he returned to a new project, one that grafted one silly little program he'd written onto another little program, not quite so silly.

He glanced up at the photo he had printed out of the FBI tech analyst.

_Hope you like roses, Ms. Garcia_, he thought.


	4. Connections

****A/N ****I own neither of these shows. Sure wish I did! I'm aware that some of the backstory for _Person of Interest_ may change as the show continues to dribble out clues about things. I'm working with the most recent information I have. Thanks as always to Esperanta, who hunts down and kills my errors!

**Pixels in the Night**

**Chapter Four**

**Connections**

Washington, D.C.

She'd been in bed for all of twenty minutes before she was upright again, eyes narrowed, huddled over her computers. Almost 3:00 AM, and there she was, mainlining energy drinks and delving deep into the mass of damaged data that VoD had spiked into her hard drive.

It was like putting together tiny shards of a Christmas ornament without the first clue what the design of the thing was, but after a while she began to see a pattern. This pattern led not to the boring, precise Harold F. Jay, but to someone else—and after a little more work, she was pretty sure that the person was right there in the D.C. area.

It was just too easy to locate Mr. Jay. Whoever the poor doofus was, he didn't need Penelope Garcia stalking him across the Internet when the real VoD was so close by. Slowly, one little piece at a time, she began to recreate some of the shattered pathways that the noise attack had lodged on her laptop.

Sure enough, there was another path embedded there. She reconstructed it slowly and carefully, but she didn't have enough to complete the links. Finally, she tiptoed out to the area where she kept encountering VoD.

Nobody chased her away.

Recalling some of her early hacker days, she typed "koko?" She'd been friends, in a virtual way, with another top hacker, now long dead or sold out, or, like Garcia, behaving to stay out of the slammer. He'd used African expressions and words, sometimes Swahili, sometimes Tswana, when the mood struck him. He'd told her _koko_ was the equivalent of "knock knock." She'd looked it up, and in Swahili it meant _testicles_.

She owed "egedn" for that one, big time.

Her doorbell rang. Her gaze flew to the clock because nobody rang your bell in the middle of the night unless something was seriously wrong. Her heart pounding, she thought of all the people she loved who routinely put themselves in harm's way to protect the public. _God, let them all be OK_, she thought.

She got up and hit the speakerphone button. "Yes?" she croaked.

"It's Tim," a somewhat familiar voice said, "from Longtime Louie's? Can I come up and talk to you for a minute?"

She wished she'd let Kevin and Derek fix the security camera right away, but_ oh, no, _she'd told them, _it can wait until the weekend, oh crap … _

"Well, pardon me for being obvious, but it's almost four A.M.," she said.

"Fine," Tim said, but he didn't sound happy about it. "Just warning you that a bunch of G-men are at the shop. They shut it down completely for the night. Dad's over there with them now. They're watching security footage and fingerprinting everything you touched. I just thought you could use a heads-up."

_G-men?_ Like the Bureau needed to know what she looked like or what she touched?

But she couldn't recall ever mentioning where she worked when she hung at Louie's. "Let them," she said, although their interest kind of creeped her out. "I'm not breaking any laws," she protested, as much to herself as to Tim.

_But maybe VoD is_, she reminded herself.

"Thanks, Tim," she said, "but I'm not worried about it."

"OK," the young man said. "I'll get on home then. You take care, Pen."

"I will, Tim. You, too."

_Or maybe VoD _is_ the Bureau_, she thought. He was certainly authoritative enough—but he also had a sense of humor, which the Bureau as a whole did not. Individual agents, for sure—especially her team.

_And he did figure out quickly that I'm a tech analyst._

And, truth be told, she _was_ worried about it.

**~ o ~**

New York City

For the first few glorious minutes of his day, he was nobody. There was nothing quite like the freedom of having no identity. He lay motionless in one of his interchangeable beds in one of his interchangeable apartments and stared up at an eggshell-hued ceiling that was, like him, a blank canvas.

He stretched slowly, coaxing life back into his aching muscles, performing a few of the silly exercises the physical therapists had shown him after the—after the _event_. One thing that followed him from place to place, from life to life, was his physical disability. Regardless of how assiduously he covered his tracks, he was always _that little man with the stiff neck and the limp_. Fortunately, most of his life activities were carried out in a chair, so his handicap was barely noticeable when he was on the job. He could pretend, often for hours at a time, that nothing had ever happened.

Eventually reality crept in from the edges and sank deep into his being. He sat up—carefully, knees drawn up, back moving rigidly as a unit—and ran his hands through his hair. He was, oh, hell, Harold something. Wren or Crane or Partridge or Jay or some other damn bird, but most importantly, he was Harold Finch. He was the servant of the Machine. It was like being a vestal virgin, but without those pesky vows of chastity, of poverty.

Well, not directly.

Like any woman would find anything about him erotic except his bank accounts.

He pulled one of his dozens upon dozens of laptops toward him and consulted a spreadsheet that tracked his myriad telephone numbers. He'd had five calls—pharmacies, newspaper delivery services, work-related questions—on four of his identities. One call to his freelance journalist identity was from one of "his" sources. As he brewed his morning tea, he made notes on how to answer those calls.

After his shower and his breakfast, he selected one of a dozen cell phones and reprogrammed it, on the off-chance that someone—ideally, the enchanting Ms. Garcia—were to call Harold F. Jay.

_You're a sad and pathetic man_, he told himself. It never paid to let his hopes rise.

He threw the coverlet over his sheets, left a tip for the housekeeping service, and left for the library.

**~ o ~**

Quantico, VA

She never bothered trying to go to sleep after the Longtime Louie thing, so she got to the office much earlier than usual. She refilled her coffee mug, locked herself into her techie lair, and sat down in front of her monitors. To the array already in front of her she added a new one: the laptop she'd used the night before. She wouldn't use Bureau hardware or software to make these connections.

She wouldn't even use the Bureau's net connections. Instead, she took out her personal, non-Bureau cell phone and set it to function as a wireless hub.

This would all be on her, for better or worse. She calculated that she had twenty minutes until the early birds on the Team (Morgan and Hotchner) were awake, another ten before they first started calling on her. So—half an hour.

The first item of business was to get beyond the façade that was "Harold F. Jay." Whoever VoD was, he wanted her to connect him with Jay. Therefore, it was possible that the two men knew each other.

She'd already determined to her own satisfaction that Mr. Jay must have some alternate place to conceal his money, which meant that he was hiding something.

Which meant, of course, that she would find it.

And there it was, Mr. Jay's bank and credit card accounts, and totally without a warrant, so it had to be done completely on her own if she didn't want the Bureau climbing all over her.

Mr. Jay had a monthly automatic deposit from Molyneaux, Jay, and Fritts, followed by several automatic payments for rent, utilities, insurance, newspaper, and a cleaning service. He had subscriptions to two technical magazines. _He's beyond boring_, she thought. Every week he withdrew $400, no doubt for groceries, dog food, and incidentals.

_Where are the restaurants? Online purchases? _

_Dog food_. She frowned. _Where the hell are the vet's bills? _

Digging yet another phone out of her bag, she dialed Molyneaux, Jay, and Fritts, and asked to speak to Mr. Jay. Some friendly female informed her that Mr. Jay was out of the office, and offered to connect her with his voice mail.

"No, thank you," she said. "I'll try another time."

She rang off and punched in the number for his landline. "You've reached the Jay residence," a formal male electronic voice announced, and crisply directed her to leave a message.

A few well-placed requests online and she had the cell number of Harold Jay. Without further hesitation, she connected.

One ring. Two rings.

"Hello?" a deep male voice said. _Nice_ voice. Like velvet.

A real voice.

Aiming for a seductive tone, she asked, "Is this Harold?"

"I'm sorry," the man said. "He's stepped out for a few minutes. May I take a message?"

Crap. For all she knew, this could be the freaking Bureau searching the guy's apartment.

Changing tactics rapidly, she turned on a more businesslike tone. "Yes, please," she said, falling back on her original cover story. Keeping her tone friendly, downright perky, she said, "This is Dr. Morgan's office, calling to remind him that it's time to bring Reese in for his shots."

"I—beg your pardon?" the voice intoned.

"Reese?" she prompted. "Neutered male beagle?"

"I'll, ah, give him the message," the velvety voice assured her.

"Thank you so much! We're looking forward to seeing his furry little face."

A pause. "I'll definitely tell Harold," the voice assured her. "I'll be _delighted_ to tell him."

_Huh_, she thought. _Maybe he's gay_.

**~ o ~**

New York City

The man who at the moment called himself Harold Finch dried his hands and hung the towel on the rack, then cleaned the lenses of his glasses and returned to his computer station.

To his pleasure, his partner and only friend was seated across from his own chair, his left foot cocked up and resting on his right knee. He smiled as Harold approached.

"Good morning, Harold," he said. It was a _weird_ smile.

"Good morning, Mr. Reese," the alleged Finch said somewhat sternly. First names were fine under some circumstances, but he found true comfort in distance and the formal courtesies.

The smile got _weirder_. "Keeping things from me, Harold?"

Finch was unamused. "I'm a very private person, Mr. Reese. As, in fact, are you. Has this only now penetrated your consciousness?"

Reese nodded toward the right side of his computer station. "Your phone rang while you were out. _Harold_."

Whoops.

_What a loser, what a sad man you are_, he reminded himself. _Probably someone from MJ&F, hoping for a quick programming workaround._

Outwardly he showed nothing. "Phones do that from time to time."

"They do," Reese confirmed. "I thought it was you calling me—"

"From the restroom? Really, Mr. Reese, I can't imagine what—"

"Imagine my surprise when some woman from Dr. Morgan's office told me to tell you that it's time to bring me in for my shots."

Finch stared, utterly nonplussed. "Your what?"

"She said that Reese needed to come in for his shots. That they're looking forward to seeing his furry little face." He batted his eyes. "Harold, my face hasn't been furry for months."

Finch reviewed quickly Harold Jay's identity and back story.

_Oh._

_Oh, dear._

Finch drew himself up with as much dignity as he could manage under the circumstances. "If you'd been more civilized about it, I might have been inclined to explain that to you. Under current circumstances, I believe I'd prefer to keep my private life private."

Reese shrugged. "Be that way. No new number today?"

"None."

Reese unfolded himself from the chair. "Then I believe I'll go and conduct a little business of my own."

"Fine."

He supposed that he sounded more than a little dismissive, but—_she'd called_. There was no dog named Reese. Only someone who was delving deep into that particular shell that he hid inside would know about the dog. Considering the multiplicity of his identities, the likelihood that anyone else in the known universe was checking up on Harold F. Jay was unlikely.

On the other hand, any other entities poking around that particularly dangerous corner of cyberspace might have gone in search of either of them.

Or both of them.

He consulted his spreadsheet and determined that a hangup on Harold Jay's landline had preceded the call to Jay's mobile by four minutes.

Four minutes. That was _fast _work for accessing hidden cell records.

He wanted to leap online and follow her trail. He told himself that it was only to ensure that she wasn't being stalked by one of Weeks's thugs—or worse. Of course, if both of them were under scrutiny, it would be unwise, so he decided to wait for further information.

He finally allowed himself a tiny grin.

_Oh, my._

He wondered whether Ms. Garcia had informed Reese that he'd been neutered.


	5. Wiggle Room

****A/N ****I own neither of these shows. Sure wish I did! I'm aware that some of the backstory for _Person of Interest_ may change as the show continues to dribble out clues about things. I'm working with the most recent information I have. Thank you, as always, to Esperanta, beta par excellence, with her eagle eye and her twisted sense of humor.

**Pixels in the Night**

**Chapter Five**

**Wiggle Room**

New York City

If you got right down to "Who are you, exactly?"—and it was a question the man known as Harold Finch asked himself from time to time, although less often as he'd grown older—you would fall into a Clintonesque trap of defining what "are" are. Er, _is_. Probably the easiest criterion to use would be, _Which identity do you spend the most time in over the space of a week? _

And if that was how you were measuring identity, then the answer would be _Harold Wren_. Mr. Wren, after all, attended to day-job business at his firm of underwriters at least three days a week. Harold Wren owned a duplex apartment in a discreetly old-money corner of the upper east side. He served on the boards of several charities. Wren had provided the seed money for—and had reaped the rich rewards of—the software behemoth that IFT had become under the direction of the late Nathan Ingram (the man whom the U.S. government believed to have designed and built the Machine). Ingram's son, Will, considered him his Uncle Harold, practically a second father, albeit a sweetly fussy and boring one.

Wren had a corner office as featureless as it was luxurious, a personal assistant who boasted quietly but accurately to his friends that he practically ran the business when Wren was out, and an executive secretary who confided (also quietly but accurately, if truth be told) to her friends that Mr. Wren really, really needed to get laid.

Wren was no more real than Finch or Partridge or Crane or Jay, but he'd been around since 1976 and had a documentable history through MIT and Nathan Ingram for almost 40 years, so he was certainly more nearly opaque than other versions of his reality—and even _he _had a reputation as "reclusive."

On this particular day, Harold Wren arrived at his office mid-morning, met with his managers, and enjoyed a modest meal of poached salmon and a spinach salad with his favorite luncheon companions, potential new algorithms.

Well, all right, he did allow his thoughts to stray to a particularly vivid member of the FBI's ranks of technical analysts, but he was realistic about it. Garcia was a hacker, with a hacker's mentality. She was pursuing a problem, a puzzle to be solved. He didn't mind being reduced to being a puzzle or a problem. In some ways, it was a lot less trouble than the whole flesh-and-blood thing.

Over his tiramisu, for no reason other than nervous habit, he checked the place where he had last seen Penelope.

And there she was again, sniffing around one area after another. He couldn't technically see her, but he was aware of a presence there, and a gentle nudge confirmed where the signal was coming from.

_Really, you'd think the Bureau could keep her busier than that! What on earth are my tax dollars paying for, anyway?_

With a sigh, he called up his little chat program.

_ $Z ^ Open di_LOG3.04_

_user=VoD says:_ This is no longer amusing, Ms. Garcia. Do you never learn?

_user=just_me says:_ valid question, jagoff: are you stalking ME or protecting IT?

_user=VoD says:_ Valid answer: neither. Now go away, Garcia.

_user=just_me says: _and why did you go to all the trouble to mislead me with the phony baloney harold jay identity? looks like i'm not the one here with trust issues, ya?

He stared at the screen for a full minute. He'd known she was good, but she was way beyond good, and it wasn't the FBI's hand behind her explorations. He knew their touch, and it was as heavy-handed as that of the NSA.

Smiling to himself, he tapped a few more keys.

_user=VoD says_: I have so little mystery that I have to create it where I can.

_user=just_me says: _ya, so little mystery but a double scoop of bullshit looks like to me

She backed off, but left the dialog box open.

_user=just_me says:_ what are you wearing?

Rolling his eyes in exasperation, he spat some random noise at her machine and closed the dialog program.

_What am I wearing? Honestly. _

_How AOL in the Nineties!_

But he couldn't quite wipe the grin off his face.

**~ o ~**

Quantico, VA

She probably shouldn't have done the goofy little "What are you wearing" thing, but she'd needed to keep the dude off-balance for just a few seconds longer. This time, she'd been concentrating not on his location, but the activity around the area where they met.

She'd told Kevin that it was like "standing in a blizzard of data," but that description, she now saw, was wholly inadequate. These were no delicate snowflakes of information. This was like standing in a blizzard of office complexes, massive factories, skyscrapers, all plummeting top speed right at her. The sheer data-suck had to be, like, datastream upon datastream upon datastream, terabytes per second.

This is serious shit.

She considered her question to VoD: _Are you stalking ME or protecting IT? _And VoD's reply: _Neither. _So, alternatives? Was VoD stalking the data-suck? Did VoD believe he was protecting her? There was some evidence to support the latter. So—what was he protecting her from? Not the NSA, surely. The data-suck had to belong to NSA, another step on the road to Big Brother, but just sorting the data, never mind analyzing it—that had to be at least eight years down the road. Maybe a little less. At least five, though.

This time, she found no hints of any other presence in the shards of random programs VoD had spewed at her hard drive. Once again, it had managed to bypass her firewalls but had done no damage.

But now there was a copy of that odd little _di_LOG3.04_ program of her very own sitting there, just asking to have the crap reverse-engineered out of it.

Virtually speaking, she walked around it for a bit, poking at it, sending her virus and trojan software in close to sniff deeply for potential signs of enemy action. The thing that most concerned her was that it seemed that the most recent change to the program had been made just eleven hours earlier. She wanted to open it, to watch how it worked, but her lunch break was almost over, and things were heating up in Biloxi.

There was a tiny yellow flash on one of her monitors. She closed down her private wi-fi hub connection altogether and shut down the laptop, all business again.

It was an email from Kevin Lynch, really racking up the overtime hours with White Collar. He'd sent a list of 49 names he hoped she could perform deep searches on—49! Like the BAU gave her so little to keep herself occupied, she snorted to herself as she started to type out a snarky reply.

"Agent Garcia," a familiar voice said.

She swiveled in her chair to see Section Chief Erin Strauss in the doorway of her lair.

Alone of the higher-ups at Quantico, Chief Strauss called her Agent, although her actual title was Technical Analyst. While other Bureau analysts specialized in certain kinds of searches and performed those searches for many kinds of units, Penelope's tight connection with the Behavioral Analysis Unit meant she did a broad range of searches for this one little group of people. She was a Team member in every sense of the word. She'd even taken the profiling coursework that qualified her to assess cases as they came in and assign them to certain agents, or—with major problems, like Biloxi—send off the whole Team.

The Team called her Agent and Strauss called her Agent. Everyone else called her Technical Analyst Garcia.

_Even VoD_, she thought in passing. _When he doesn't call me Ms. Garcia_.

"May I come in, dear?" Strauss asked.

"Of course, ma'am." Her heart flew to her throat just as it had when her doorbell rang deep into the night. Supervisors don't casually drop in on you and then ask gravely and politely for your permission to come in—not unless there's something very wrong.

_It isn't Kevin. He was on the job and sending email two minutes ago._

As rapidly and as thoroughly as any supercomputer, she reviewed her Team members and their assorted vulnerabilities: Rossi and his high-cholesterol eating habits; Hotchner and his Type-A personality. Either one was a stroke or a coronary just waiting to happen. Morgan, always the first through the door, and sometimes over the shattered remains of it. Prentiss, another Type-A, plus God only knew what the Doyle thing did to her. JJ, cancer ran deep in her family, and she doesn't take care of herself, not really. Puts everyone else first. Dr. Reid, likely to get distracted by a critical pattern and miss the UNSUB coming up behind him.

_I love them all. They are my true family._

She didn't actually have anything like a real visitor's chair, so Chief Strauss sat down on a counter-top. She gave one of her patented inscrutable smiles and said, "Do you know of an establishment in Georgetown called Longtime Louie's?"

Crap, of _course_. Aggravation, but at least everyone was safe.

"Sure," she said. "I was there last night, and I know that somebody from here was checking the place out."

"Nobody from here," Strauss said. "I've checked. Agent Garcia, is there something you'd like to share with me?"

_Yeah, if I had a yeast infection, maybe…._

She was not about to surrender any information without knowing the lay of the land. She'd picked up more than fashion tips and a Kevlar vest from hanging around profilers. "Why did you check? Obviously, you heard that _someone_ was checking on me."

Strauss's lips tightened. Obviously she wasn't a big fan of being questioned. Funny thing, higher up you got in the Bureau, the less inclined you were to answer questions. It was a consistent pattern. "Louis Rogoff called me," she said at last.

She considered exactly how much she should and should not share. "Last night I was sitting in Longtime Louie's, just chilling, when I encountered a couple people online—" _A couple_ always sounded better than _one_, or some other number. It provided wiggle room. Garcia was a great believer in wiggle room. "—and got to chatting with them. When we stopped talking, I went home. Two hours later, Lou's son Tim rang my doorbell. He wanted me to know that the Bureau had people down there treating the booth where I sat like a crime scene."

She glared across at Strauss. "I didn't understand it then and I don't understand it now. I _thought_ that maybe it was just a training exercise for the noobs in a scene-processing class. Obviously it was more than that."

_And I should have seen it, should have paid more attention to it. But I got myself distracted chasing VoD._

"How long was Tim Rogoff at your place?"

"Just—he didn't come in at all, ma'am. I don't invite people up to my apartment at four in the morning. He just told me over the intercom that there were guys from the Bureau—"

"Did he say they were from the Bureau?" Strauss interrupted.

"No, he said—" What the hell _had_ he said, anyway? "—ah, Feds, maybe. No, G-men. He said there were G-men down there, that they'd closed the place down and were processing the booth—he didn't say _processing_, though, he said fingerprinting or something. And I said that I didn't care, that I hadn't been doing anything wrong."

_And I wasn't. And I haven't. And is VoD the cause of this, the target of this, or the victim? What the fuck have I gotten myself into?_

"And when did Mr. Rogoff leave?"

"No idea, ma'am. I didn't talk to him for more than thirty seconds. I'm sure it'll show on the building's security footage. Can you tell me what this is all about?"

Strauss's eyes narrowed and her brow furrowed. "Timothy Rogoff never got home last night. When his father tried to file a missing persons report, they gave him the usual wait-twenty-four-hours advisory, so he called the Bureau to ask if we knew anything about him. Garcia, do you have enemies?"

She recalled typing to VoD, _so you're like this noble knight saving me from the big scary dragon? _And the eerie reply, the one she'd brushed off as condescending male bullshit at the time: _Y__ou have no idea how big or how scary. _

"No more than anyone else on the Team," she lied coolly. "I'm sorry I can't help you, ma'am. Please keep me in the loop and let me know if there's anything else I can do, but the guys are getting back from lunch over in Biloxi and they're gonna be needing me in just a few minutes."

Strauss lifted her rump off the counter top. "Thank you, Garcia." She hesitated at the door. "I believe I'm going to see if I can get access to the security footage from Louie's and your place. This just doesn't make sense, and when things don't make sense, I smell the NSA."

**~ o ~**

New York City

Shortly before 6:00 PM, he began to think seriously of escaping back to the library, the one place where he truly felt alive these days. Because, like some kind of lovesick dope, he was hoping that Ms. Garcia would have opened the program he deposited on her hard drive, he took one last peek at the nexus where the world butted up against The Machine.

And what he saw surprised the living hell out of him.

Five characters: _koko?_

_Oh, dear._

He laced his fingers together tightly and rested his lips against his knuckles. He had no idea how to respond to that.

Suddenly his own program surged up at him.

_ $Z ^ Open di_LOG3.04_

_user=just_me says:_ if you're there tell me a story about dragons

His fingers flew in two directions, on two tasks.

_user=VoD says:_ Dragons are to be avoided.

_user=just_me says_: you know the hogwarts motto? I always took that as more of a dare

Goodness, now he was working on three tasks, but the third was the easiest. Within eight seconds, he knew that the motto of the Hogwarts School from the Harry Potter stories was _Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus__,_ which was, more or less, _Don't tickle a sleeping dragon_.

_user=VoD says_: I can't say I'm surprised. You strike me as the kind that thrives on challenge.

_user=just_me says_: got some ugly ass dragons on my butt, shoulda listened to you

He sighed deeply.

_user=VoD says:_ Under other circumstances that might have been music to my ears.

_user=just_me says_: so that's a no on help?

Too much was riding on his freedom. He would have loved to help her, would have given much to help her, to meet her, to—no, that was quite impossible even if it were desirable. But he was no longer his own agent. For all of his many identities, his higher calling was that of Harold Finch, resident of an abandoned library. Servant of The Machine.

His heart heavy, he adjusted his glasses and typed again.

_user=VoD says_: All I have is advice. Please stay out of this corner of the w.

He held his breath.

_user=just_me says_: ok bye

_Good-bye, Ms. Garcia_, he thought at the flashing cursor.

**~ o ~**

Quantico, VA

She hadn't really expected anything useful from VoD, so she felt no particular bitterness as she closed down the di_LOG3.04 program. VoD had told her to steer clear, she'd gone and played with fire, and she'd gotten a tit in the wringer. To mix a metaphor or two.

Her screen exploded into waves of color. Electronic arpeggios sounded and dozens of roses, red, pink, white, yellow, and coral drifted down her screen, spinning in 3-D. It was a cute little animation, really well rendered. It reminded her of some of the playful stuff that used to come out of IFT before it got all serious and Darth-Vadery about software.

From the right side of her screen a little pink biplane emerged, tootling along, its engine sounding like kitten farts as it dragged a banner across her line of vision until it was perfectly centered.

_Hello Ms. Garcia!_

"Hello, whoever the heck you are," she said softly. "Maybe we'll run into each other again, under different circumstances." She grinned. "And when we do, I'll dust your _butt_, I'm warning you. Arrogant smartass, you'd think he was Nathan-frickin'-Ingram."

She closed down her laptop and gathered her things to head home.


	6. Loose Ends

****A/N ****I own neither of these shows. Sure wish I did! I'm aware that some of the backstory for _Person of Interest_ may change as the show continues to dribble out clues about things. I'm working with the most recent information I have. Thank you, as always, to Esperanta, who hunts down all my errors and makes me look good.

**Pixels in the Night**

**Chapter Six **

**Loose Ends**

Washington, D.C.

When people asked Penelope Garcia for thrilling tales of the FBI's work, this week's case in Biloxi would never make the list, but in many ways it was her favorite kind. Her Team was never in peril. The victim—a six-year-old boy—was recovered early on, wandering along a rural road where his captor, terrified of arrest, had let him out of the car. The case ended, not in a shoot-out or a forced entry, but when the UNSUB used his ATM card—and Garcia noted the activity—three blocks from where Prentiss and Morgan were cruising and looking for him. He gave up to them without a struggle, and she had played a significant part in it.

Better still, because it was Friday night, her Team was at this moment winging its way home. Weary as everyone might feel, _home for the weekend_ trumped _tired_ every time.

Great case. Really, best kind of case ever. If they were all like this, Penelope would be a whole lot happier.

As the cherry on the top of her stuff-going-right sundae, her cell rang as she filled Esther's tank, and it was Erin Strauss.

"Agent Garcia," the Section Chief said, and her tone was cheerful. "The missing Tim Rogoff has been found, safe and sound."

"Great!" Garcia replied. "Where?"

"He seems to have been in a motel with a woman who wasn't his girlfriend," said Strauss. "He called his father, all sheepish and apologetic, about twenty minutes ago."

Garcia thanked her and rang off, but then she checked the time and started thinking.

She paid for her gas, picked up a quart of half-and-half and a dozen of Kevin's favorite bagels at the convenience mart, and headed for home.

By the time she was within a few blocks of her apartment complex, she was troubled. _That just doesn't sound anything like Tim_, she decided. Maybe she'd spent way too much time with the BAU, where all manner of twisted things could (and did) happen, but it just didn't feel right. Tim didn't, well, _profile _as someone who'd drop out of sight from 4:00 AM until nearly 8:00 PM, then write it off with a phone call, sheepish or otherwise. He was a solemn guy, geeky and bookish. His girlfriend, Rosie, was as tall and scholarly as he was.

Ah, well. Eventually, everything got answered. The critical thing was that whatever was going on in his life, it was unrelated to whatever bullshit the NSA had pulled when she…when she—No.

She physically shook her head, trying to clear it of images of Tim Rogoff, kidnapped by the NSA and questioned, then drugged into amnesia and dumped at some fleabag motel to try and reconstruct how he'd arrived there.

_I've spent too much time among America's Most Twisted. I'm overthinking this._

The sad fact was that she already missed VoD. Maddening as he might be, he was witty and protective and he seemed genuinely to know something about what was going on out there in the world of endless data streams. The cloudburst of roses had been cute, too. She wondered whether the copyright lawyers at IFT would bigfoot all over him if they found he'd been messing with their code—and the more she thought about it, the more confident she was that VoD had hijacked some of IFT's code for his little floral offering. Cleverly, for sure, and he'd probably covered his tracks well, but there was a certain genius to some of Nathan Ingram's stuff that you just didn't see nowadays.

**~ o ~**

New York City

As the sun set, the man who was currently calling himself Harold Francis Jay murmured sweet nothings to the neutered male beagle that tripped along by his side, its tail waggling joyously. When he wasn't sweet-talking his dog, he sang Cab Calloway standards in a soft but pleasant voice. "_She messed around with a bloke named Smokey_," he sang to his pooch. "_She loved him though he was cokey._"

An unfamiliar sedan was parked in front of his apartment building. He slowed to a stop beside a tree as though his dog needed to piddle and studied the sedan carefully. "So, what do you think, little pup?" he murmured to the dog. "Is this our company?"

When the dog failed to respond, he squared his shoulders and took up the scat verse again. "_He took her down to Chinatown, and he showed her how to kick the gong around, hi-dee-hi-dee-hi-dee-hi—_"

"Mr. Jay?" an unfamiliar voice said, behind him and to his left.

He turned slowly, languidly. "Yes?" He looked the man—the men, actually, two of them, both a hair under six feet tall, both with humorless smiles and cold eyes—up and down suspiciously. "Do I know you?"

He watched their eyes taking in his soft, fluffy aqua V-neck sweater, his heavy jeweled watch, his three gold chains, the opal stud in his earlobe, his several rings. Felt them analyzing him, judging him. Knew that the closer of the two men was studying his eyes, trying to figure out whether Jay was wearing eyeliner—_just a smidge_—and cast his own eyes down at the beagle.

"Where was I, angel?" he murmured at the dog. "Right, _He took her down to Chinatown, and he showed her how to kick the gong around, hi-dee-hi-dee—_"

"Dick Forbes," the closer man said. "We're here on behalf of Pear Tree Equity—"

Harold Jay stopped, startled. "That's the company that owns our—rather, the company that _owns_ the company that owns our—"

"Right," Forbes said. "The owners sent around a letter a month or so ago. We've been asking some of the tenants if they'd allow us to take a look around, just assessing the general upkeep of the property."

"Well," Jay said hesitantly, "I don't recall the letter, but sometimes I lose track of that sort of thing. A steel trap when it comes to programming, but that day-to-day stuff? Just call me a dizzy blond, you know? They aren't thinking about selling the property, are they? Because I don't want to have to get used to dealing with some other management bunch."

"No, no," said Forbes. "Just shopping around for a better deal on insurance."

"Oh." Jay looked around vaguely. "I suppose there's no harm done, then. Certainly, if you want to look around, you're welcome."

The man who now called himself Forbes had called himself Smithers of the DEA earlier that day, when he'd appeared at the offices of Pear Tree Equity and told the general manager that they needed access to Harold Jay's apartment as part of an ongoing investigation into a local designer drug distribution ring in gay clubs. Jay knew this because the general manager'd made an FYI call to him as Harold Partridge, CEO of Pear Tree Equity, and told him all about it. Partridge didn't like messy scandals, so he'd been all for cooperation with the authorities.

And he knew that all the right magazines were in Harold Jay's apartment, all the right phone numbers programmed into his phone. He'd ensured that there were bits of kibble under the fridge and chew toys under the couch, and stuck a couple recent phone message memos up on the corkboard by the answering machine. He'd selected a modest range of technical TV programs and LOGO channel movies to appear on Harold Jay's TiVo and had loaded _Psycho Beach Party_ into the DVD player. The sound system was loaded with legends from the heyday of the Cotton Club.

By any name, Harold was _all_ about the details, right down to the Web sites in Harold F. Jay's browser cache—mostly tech and math blogs, show biz gossip, and a touch of porn—and the specialty brand of lube in the drawer of the left bedside table.

Jay scooped up the beagle—he was just the cutest thing, true name Ambrogio, borrowed for the occasion from the daughter of one of Harold Wren's money managers—and limped along after the alleged property assessment specialists.

He had insinuated himself into the whole Penelope-Garcia-stalks-The-Machine thing for more than one reason. It had made it possible for her to make contact, however amusingly, but more importantly, it had also provided him with a warning system to assess exactly who else was hanging around the butt-end of The Machine, so to speak, hoping to make contact.

So far, they seemed long on competence and short on finesse and imagination.

He wondered whether either of these somber men knew that "kicking the gong around" was Thirties jive-talk for smoking opium.

Or cared.

What sad, limited lives they must lead!

**~ o ~**

Washington, D.C.

The word from Longtime Louie's was, well, disturbing. The guys who'd been there in the wee hours of the morning, oh, absolutely, had shown FBI creds. They were there, they explained, because they had a report that someone had been impersonating a federal agent via their wi-fi. Which almost certainly meant that Strauss had nailed them: They were NSA. The good guys, in a creepy, invasive way.

Had VoD turned her in? How could he, and why would he? He'd been the one to identify her, and it hadn't been because she was using a Bureau machine or uplink or Bureau software. He had tried, repeatedly, to shoo her away from that...weird area. That data stream-cubed that had to belong to the NSA.

But somewhere in the noise, there had been a local signal, too. She'd never managed to pin it down firmly. Maybe the local signal dude was the individual impersonating an agent, and when VoD _covered her tracks_, as he'd described it, he'd so scrambled the signals that Darth NSA had confused hers with his. She in turn had confused VoD with the poor doofus, Harold Jay, who was probably still wondering why some strange veterinarian's office had called him.

_Thanks a bunch, VoD. No wonder you couldn't help me. My problems seem to stem from you and your attempts to protect me._

The flowers were cute, though. And the little biplane? Creative and adorable.

She opened her laptop and powered it on, intending to do a little more research, but before she could even begin, her cell rang.

"This is Ben from Statistics," a familiar voice said. "Picked up on what might be a serial, but can't find anything other than an odd M.O. If it is a serial, it's gonna be a real pain in the ass, because the victims and locations are just all over the place. I'm forwarding it to your mailbox, but I wanted to give you a heads-up on it, because if it's one UNSUB, he's due to strike again soon."

"Thanks," she said. "I'll check it out now." She clicked over to her work mail account. After a minute reading through what she'd been sent, her heart sank. She could see how it hadn't been flagged initially: the first victim was missing almost $9,000; the rational assumption was that it had been a particularly violent robbery. The second had been missing $7,000 in a different state, and in terms of victimology had nothing in common with the first victim. With the third victim, in yet another state, the pattern finally emerged. Robbery, murder, followed by furious destruction of the victim's face.

She linked in to her professional databases and started a detailed search among the victims. While she waited for the programs to grind into action, she speed-dialed a weary-sounding Unit Chief.

"Hey, Hotch," she said, "Stats sent us something that's looking more and more like a serial in progress."

"Looking?" Aaron Hotchner echoed.

"Three victims so far, nothing obvious in common, in three different states, but the MO's unusual and consistent." She checked her screen. "White male, 51; black female, 25; white female, 46," she read off. "Chicago, Illinois, then Colorado Springs, then Peru, Indiana. Big city, little city, rural—all about a month apart, all robbed of several thousand dollars, and all of them had their faces sliced to ribbons post-mortem."

"All over the place," Hotch said. "Something we can work from Q until there's a new scene."

"Yes, sir," she said. She sensed the ambivalence in his voice. Everyone preferred to work from Quantico when they could, minimizing the craziness in their lives. On the other hand, a fresh crime scene could be their best friend for closing a case.

"You're on victimology?"

"On it and all over it," she assured him.

"Fine." He sighed. "Keep me in the loop, send me everything you have. Plan on presenting it to the team tomorrow morning for discussion only."

"Yes, sir, I—wow." She blinked at her screen. "Sir, I think I have a connection. Every one of these people had cosmetic surgery in the last year or so. And it isn't all vanity stuff, either. A rebuilt external ear after an auto accident, a nose-and-chin job, and another rhinoplasty."

"And he's destroying their faces," Hotch added. "You're onto something, Garcia. Same doctor? Insurance? Clinic?"

"Doesn't look like it, but I'm still searching," she replied, happily engaged once more in the process of bringing down the bad guys.

**~ o ~**

New York City

Once again settled into his favorite office chair, in the only identity that really mattered to him nowadays, that of Harold Finch, servant of The Machine, he sipped an herbal tea and rubbed fretfully, unconsciously, at the itchy place where Harold Jay's opal stud had been glued to his earlobe.

He was no actor, but in the end all that mattered were the details. He was all about the details. The fake-insurance, fake-DEA guys had prowled through Harold Jay's apartment for the better part of twenty minutes, during which they no doubt decided on the best places to install surveillance cameras. The second banana, the guy who wasn't not-Forbes, had tried to engage him in conversation. "Harold Jay" had insisted on pretending that the beagle was the one having the conversation, speaking in a high, goofy voice and moving the dog's forepaws as emphasis. Not-not-Forbes had lasted less than two minutes before fleeing to fake interest in the bathroom grouting.

Meanwhile, not-Harold-Jay, never one for passing up an opportunity, had bluejacked both men's phones.

As the clock inched closer to midnight, the hour when The Machine dumped _irrelevant_ data and leaked the social security numbers of New York City _irrelevants_ to a waiting Harold Finch, Finch checked the general area. He'd backed himself up so thoroughly that anyone who tried to locate him, after they'd chased him through twenty-nine countries, would connect him to a (nonexistent) teenage girl in Mexico City.

Suddenly, there was a presence.

_Honestly, this girl's learning curve must be a total flatline…._

Wearily, he opened up his dialog program.

_ $Z ^ Open di_LOG3.04_

_user=VoD says:_ LAST TIME GARCIA, DEAD SERIOUS - back off

_user=just_me says:_ ok ok, cool down, but really what are you wearing

He paused to massage his temples. This girl was aging him at an appalling rate.

_user=VoD says:_ Suit and tie

_user=just_me says:_ ew lighten up, life's too short for wearing a tie

_user=VoD says:_ I'll wear it in the shower if it will keep you away from there

He still was not sure why it was so important for him to stay as close to the truth as he could with this woman.

_user=just_me says: _'there,' so you aren't actually there? Who are you anyway?

_user=VoD says_: I'm sorry, I can't give you my name. I'm not supposed to be out here now, doing this. Neither are you.

_user=just_me says_: you make it sound so mysterious.

_user=VoD says_: It is, but not in a pleasant, exciting kind of way. I can describe myself. Will that help?

_user=just_me says_: sure, I guess so.

_user=VoD says:_ Will you go away if I describe myself?

_user=just_me says:_ do you really want me to?

_user=VoD says:_ Yes, I do. And as much as I enjoy talking to you, and I do, you should not be here.

_user=just_me says:_ right, here there be dragons and all that, ya?

_user=VoD says:_ Dragons and much, much more, dear.

He actually blushed._ Oh, my. Did I just call her dear?_

_user=just_me says: _then ok, if this is my last chance to get to know you, if you describe yourself I promise not to come back here, and I really really like the roses. Did you port some IFT code into that?

He stared at his screen for a few seconds. Not slow on the uptake at all, this girl. By far the smartest creature he had met online in at least ten years.

_And she knows the 'koko?' command._

As he tapped keys, he grinned in spite of himself.

_user=VoD says:_ Nope. We stole it from the same source, way back before there was an IFT.

_user=just_me says: _from egedn, right?

He froze for few seconds, feeling himself tumbling down a rabbit hole. He bit his lip and carefully considered his response.

_user=VoD says: _From egedn, yes. His code's still out there if you know where to look.

_user=just_me says: _so you were gonna describe yourself

_user=VoD says_: I'm a bit beyond middle age and people describe me as geeky. Size 5'8" with medium build. Dark hair. I still have most of it. The hair, I mean. Blue eyes and very nearsighted. (_Was it dishonest not to mention his limp, his fused spine?_)

_user=just_me says_: Where do you live?

_User VoD says_: (The truth, phrased carefully, would work here, describing thousands upon thousands of educated older men's living quarters) NYC, rent-controlled old apt full of books, tiny kitchen. Big window beside my computer station

_user=just_me says_: What are you wearing?

_user=VoD says_: Suit and tie, sorry, still dressed for work

_user=just_me says_: What do you do?

_user=VoD says_: IT, big surprise, huh?

_user=just_me says_: since when does IT wear suit and tie?

_She is sharp, this girl..._

An advantage to hiding in plain sight for so long was that the lies came so easily, almost bewilderingly easily to a man who had once valued the truth.

_user=VoD says_: Since management got the idea it would give dept. class

_user=just_me says_: Ew I so understand. Same thing with the bureaucracy here. Ghost of J Edgar and all.

_user=VoD says_: I can imagine.

_user=just_me says: _Thanks for being straight with me. I promise not to come back. Enjoyed talking to you. I knew egedn btw, you woulda liked him ~waving good-bye now~

She vanished.

For a few seconds he resented the life that denied him relationships, but then it was time to see what numbers came up this night, and he was once again Harold Finch, servant to The Machine.


	7. Green ForCause and Pee Cup Sheryl

A/N: OK, I was holding off on updating this, hoping that the last two episodes of the season would give me more direction with the freaking Machine, and as you know, it gave me – Grace. Listen, people, Grace may show up in some more (or less) angsty story somewhere along the line, but the 'Verse for _this_ story is, um, Graceless.

Thanks as always to Esperanta, whose eagle eye makes me look good.

**Pixels in the Night**

**Chapter Seven**

**Green For-Cause and Pee Cup Sheryl**

Quantico, VA

On Saturday morning, fortified by caffeine and sweet rolls, Penelope Garcia presented to the assembled Team the case of the killer who destroyed the faces of his victims. (Yes, it was less a point of pride than a fact of life that the profilers could bite into the dark red core of a strawberry danish while a mutilated body glowed the same color in high-def on the screen.)

"All three of these victims went to some effort to collect the funds that the UNSUB stole from them," she explained, gesturing with her remote. "Two days before his death, William Lennox cashed in two CDs, and he took an early withdrawal hit from one of them. Gloria Jessup sold her Escalade for cash three days before she was attacked. Rachel Fisher sold the family RV and borrowed money from her brother. Fisher was the only one anybody asked 'why' about. Her brother asked what she needed the money for, and she said that she had an investment opportunity come up suddenly."

"Investment opportunity?" said JJ. "Was there anything around the house to indicate what kind of investment she was making?"

"According the the Indiana LEOs, zilch," said Garcia. "We've asked them to go back and take a closer look. I've been through her laptop, and there's nothing that even suggests she'd _ever_ been interested in investments. No email solicitations, no visits to investment websites, no nothing. Other than an interest in a pop singer half her age that borders on the downright skeevy, Rachel was about the most normal 46-year-old you're gonna find in rural America. Happily married, one grown son in the Air Force."

Rossi looked up from his notes. "How about the others? Is there a service connection?"

"That's a good question. Let me see—no, Lennox didn't serve. Neither did his widow or his first wife. He had no children. Jessup wasn't in the service—wait, her brother's in the Navy. Pretty thin, but I'll pursue that further."

"And all of these were toward the end of the month?" Prentiss asked, frowning over her iPad.

"Right, in the last week of the past three months. The days and dates varied, but they were all in the last week of the month."

"So—if he's consistent, we have at least ten days before he strikes again."

"Correct. And the problem is, where? Major urban area first, Chicago, for Lennox, then Jessup in Colorado Springs, then Fisher in Peru, Indiana. Will he go back to the western states for Number Four, or stay in the Midwest? There's no discernible pattern for sex, race, location, or age. Just…they got cosmetic surgery, they got hold of a bunch of money, then the money disappeared and they got dead."

"Fine," Unit Chief Hotchner said with a sigh. "I hate to shove anyone back out the door when we just got home, but—Morgan, on Monday you and Prentiss take on the Illinois and Indiana cases. Talk to the locals, scope out the scenes, look for anything that didn't show up in the reports. Reid, JJ, go talk to the Colorado Springs people."

When the consultations were over, as Team members either drifted home or picked up on new cases and challenges, Garcia returned to her office. There was a note at the top of her email, Kevin whining about when she'd be done with that list of names he'd sent her.

_Like I have nothing else to do here!_

There was something else, too—the faintest, subtlest delay as one of her programs booted up. Frowning, she closed it, opened something else. And something else. The delay would be imperceptible to most of the world, but this was her field of expertise. Just as a professional musician will catch an infinitesimal shift in pitch, she caught changes in the responsiveness of her programs, especially when run on her machines.

_Somebody's been playing in my yard_, she thought angrily. _Somebody's been playing with my stuff without my permission._

These hadn't even been the machines she'd used when she was checking out—oh, wherever it was that had got VoD all protective and had got the NSA's panties in a wad. She'd used her own computers, her own phone lines, for every single keystroke of it.

Cursing to herself, she ran every Bureau-approved virus and trojan detection utility there was and came up with zip, and then a couple of her own devising with a little more success.

She'd developed a new, more robust firewall for the Bureau's computers, but the FBI was at its core a bureaucracy, and it moved slowly. The request for approval was still tied up in some damn techie committee, no doubt staffed principally by non-techies. She wondered whether whoever loaded this trojan onto her machines would have been able to sneak past her new and improved programs.

When you stripped away all its fancy cloaking it was nothing but a brute-force keylogger. She copied it onto a hard drive with no external access whatsoever and fiddle-farted with it for half an hour. When she was done, she shoveled her new improved keylogger back onto her work computer.

It would still dutifully communicate with whoever or whatever the hell it was communicating with, and maybe with luck she'd find out who was receiving it, but it would send only every fifth or sixth (alternately) keystroke. She wished VoD or the NSA or whoever was monitoring her a bunch of luck trying to make any sense out of what she was doing now.

More to the point, she hoped they would make a return trip to adjust their "flawed" software. She'd have her new—though not yet officially approved—programs in place that would, ideally, track down the sonsabitches who'd installed it.

**~ o ~**

New York City

Mr. Reese was following him again. Reese was harder to lose than Detective Fusco—who had a tendency to think in two dimensions—but wasn't impossible to shake.

The man who at this particular moment was calling himself Edwin Rance Preble (not all of his names were Harold + bird) made his awkward way down the streets of Queens toward the tiny, dingy apartment building located too close to an elevated rail line where Mr. Preble's life was stored. He dodged into the red brick structure at 187, descended the stairs to the basement, punched a four-digit code into a security lock on a door marked Caution High Voltage, and let himself into a long corridor illuminated only by an Emergency Exit light. He followed the corridor past doors stenciled 185 and 183, then used a key on the door marked 181.

A two-story climb brought him out of the basement and to the second floor of the tan brick structure at the 181 address. With another key, he let himself into Apartment 2-F, a shabby one-bedroom unit that overlooked a weed-clotted back lot with a scattering of sheds, and an alley.

Within five minutes, the suit was on a hanger and the glasses were out of sight. His heavily gelled _Les Aventures de Tintin _hairdo was hidden under a trucker's cap. He wore greasy jeans and a ribbed wifebeater that exposed one of his best-kept secrets: heavily muscled and toned shoulders and biceps. There's nothing like spending a chunk of your life with a useless lower body to bulk up your upper half.

One press-on tattoo of hearts and vines later, a lit inexpensive cigar in his teeth, and he was ready to descend to the yard, where he unlocked the shed that belonged to his unit. Once he was on the ancient Harley, he relaxed his stomach muscles, exaggerating his belly.

The man who habitually called himself John Reese glanced at the aging cyclist revving his hog at the red light in front of the corner building for no more than a split second before turning his full attention again to the front and side entrances of 187. Reese knew—because the man he knew most familiarly as Harold Finch had made damn sure he found out—that Apartment 1-D in 187 belonged to a Mr. Byrd.

"Preble" returned to his dingy apartment via a different route two hours later, discouraged and weary. (A disadvantage of dozens of identities is dozens of hours at the DMV.) He prepared an omelet for himself, poured four cans of Coors Light down the sink, dropped the containers into the recycling bin, and read his mail. His landlords—subsidiaries of Pear Tree Equity—had sent him a stern letter about his back rent. He smiled slightly and lit another cigar. It would be amusing to allow one of his identities to be evicted, but not Preble's. He rather liked the old rascal.

Half an hour later, he stood naked in the bathroom of Apartment 1-D, having showered the last of Preble's cigar stink off his body. He avoided looking at anything but his face in the mirror—his body depressed him unutterably—and once again donned the inexpensive suit he'd first arrived in.

Just in time, too. He consulted one of his phones, frowned, placed a call, then hit speed dial on yet another phone. "Mr. Reese," he said to the man whom he knew perfectly well was all but crouched outside this building like a cat at a mouse hole, "if you'll be kind enough to meet me at the office, we have a new number."

**~ o ~**

Quantico, VA

She wasn't more than five minutes from leaving for home when Kevin's ringtone sounded on her cell.

"Yeah, cutie?" she purred.

"This isn't fair," Kevin Lynch said, and there was no purr whatsoever in his voice. He positively quivered with barely controlled outrage. "I've always played fair with you. OK, mostly fair. I was there for you when—"

"I don't suppose you'd like to tell me what this is all about?" Penelope snapped.

"This fucking special performance review," he said. "And I just had a surprise drug test, Pen, they're treating me like a goddamn criminal!"

A chill ran through her. The Bureau was generally pretty straight-up when it came to things like performance reviews and drug tests. You had a little warning, at least 24 hours—unless the Powers That Be were really pissed off at you. Then you got the green _for-cause_ form and a world of hurt. What on earth could Kevin have done to prompt that?

She recalled his repeated requests for her to run the backgrounds on some of those names for him. Was he dogging it, was he goofing off rather than doing his work, then expecting her to pick up the slack? But if he was, what in hell was he doing when he was goofing off? They already had him working double shifts with White Collar.

"I don't know," she said. "I honest to God don't know, Kevin. This is all news to me…." Her voice dropped off as she noticed the familiar pale green form in her own mail slot. "It's me, too, Kev," she gasped. "I have a performance review form in my interoffice, too." She looked around the outer office, not really expecting to see Sheryl from HR—but not really surprised when she saw her, either.

"Gotta go," she said, and closed off the call. She dropped her cell on the nearest desk—it was that of the new records chick who sat across from Anderson—and marched directly, no knock, no nothing, into the office of Unit Chief Aaron Hotchner.

Fortunately, he was alone, immersed in paperwork. He looked up at her, laid his pen aside, and waited for her to speak.

"The Special Performance Review," she said, barely managing to avoid shouting. "There's a green _for-cause_ notice in my interoffice, and Pee-Cup Sheryl's out there waiting for me. You could've come to me any time, sir, if you were having problems with my competence. And I'm shocked, because you—because you—"

She took in Hotchner's apparently genuine look of surprise. "You didn't order this?"

He shook his head slightly. "I wouldn't do that to you," he replied, his voice grave, "and I've always found your performance beyond extraordinary."

"Then who the hell decided that I need to whiz in a cup—"

"This is the first I've heard of it," he told her, "and technically I'm supposed to be informed when there's an action like this." He reached into a bottom drawer and fished around among file folders for a few seconds. "Here, don't leave my office until you've filed an objection to the procedures; it'll cover your butt if—"

"Sir!" she said, horrified. "I don't even do _baby aspirin__!_ What're you—"

He made a _shut-up_ gesture. "Garcia," he said, his voice low and serious, "Strauss told me that you've managed to annoy the folks at the NSA. If she'd ordered this, she'd have told me. Whatever you do—or don't do—please cover your butt until you know for sure what and who you're dealing with, and why."

**~ o ~**

Every once in a while, a number was a slam-dunk. George Walters had been exactly that easy a Person of Interest. Who wanted to kill him? His wife. Why was she going to do it? Because she and her meth-freak son from a previous marriage needed the insurance money. And how were they going to do it? It was going to look like a home invasion-robbery, with complications. They'd actually discussed it in AIM instant messages. A word in Mr. Walters's ear from the _oh, so persuasive_ Mr. Reese, and he was ready to file for divorce, change the beneficiary on his term life policy, and relocate to the home of his sister in Kennebunkport until things cooled down a little.

Slam dunk, baby.

After which Mr. Reese vanished, no doubt to continue adjusting to the sudden increase in living space he'd received for his birthday. After all, as he'd told Finch, "The problem with that classy place is that my crappy stuff looks—crappy. I need to do some upgrading."

Which left the man whom Reese knew as Harold Finch at last free to study Weeks's people, what they were doing, what they had in mind after they visited "Harold Jay" in his apartment the previous night. And sure enough, they were up to no good.

They'd installed several cameras in Harold Jay's apartment—which meant, of course, that he either had to spend hours every day making an appearance as Jay, or he'd have to come up with a persuasive reason why Jay wasn't home. He'd expected this, so he had contingencies in place.

More distressing was that another team, in D.C., had the enchanting Ms. Garcia in its sights. She was being followed, as was her—apparently unfaithful—boyfriend (who evidently wasn't working double shifts at all). Complaints had been registered about the performance not only of Ms. Garcia and Mr. Lynch, but also of Ms. Chaffee, a Bureau ballistics tech who was evidently Mr. Lynch's secret squeeze.

That hurt. That really hurt. Finch had seen nothing about Ms. Garcia that was mean, or in any way duplicitous. She didn't deserve to have her honey cheating on her.

And apparently someone else—he was still working out the details of it—someone else had been abducted, interrogated, and drugged after allegedly "warning" Garcia about something.

Harold Finch, Servant of the Machine, planned his time assiduously and maintained healthy borders between his identities. To violate the integrity of the "Harold Finch" identity could imperil everything he lived for. It was, therefore, with the greatest of trepidation that he tapped the key that connected him instantly to his partner.

"Mr. Reese," he said when the operative answered, "I know that Washington's full of people you need to avoid, but might I impose on you to take a trip there for me?"


	8. Once is Chance

****A/N ****I own neither of these shows. Sure wish I did! _Person of Interest_ continues to dribble out clues about its backstory. Most recently, of course, it was Grace (who does not exist in this 'verse). Thanks, as ever, to Esperanta the eagle-eyed beta for making me look good. Custom cover image by Hank Roll, thank you so much!

**Pixels in the Night**

**Chapter Eight **

**Once is Chance**

Washington, D.C.

It was stupid at first; she saw headlights in her rear view mirror, one car turning off the main drag, another turning on to it. Whenever she saw that she kind of grinned to herself. She'd heard the team talking about tag-team surveillance a zillion times, after all.

When the second car turned off just a mile from home and another car took its place, she smiled again. If she were an UNSUB, she'd probably be a nervous wreck by now, ready to go anywhere but where she'd been headed.

Speaking of which, she needed to pick up her eye drops at CVS. She checked her dash clock—_eight-something, plenty of time left to do it_—and when a chance came for a left, she took it, not bothering with niceties like turn signals.

The car behind her performed the same maneuver—could be anything, could be he or she forgot something, too. Lots of stores along this route, fast food outlets, nicer restaurants, but still she engaged her Bluetooth. When the car behind her did another little dance with a third car, or maybe the first one again, she speed-dialed a familiar number.

"Baby Girl," Derek Morgan's warmly affectionate voice said—honestly his voice was as much chocolate thunder as the rest of him—"what's up?"

"Derek, I pissed off some people and now I think I'm being followed."

Because he was Morgan, he didn't waste time asking if she was sure or who was doing the following. Instead, he asked for her location and direction, and when she gave them, he said, "OK, hang a right three blocks down, I'm at the Home Depot, the one that'll be to your right, you know which one I'm talking about?"

She thought about that. "The one between the pool and spa place and TGI Friday's?"

"That's the one, sweetness. Now, I have the truck tonight, you recall what it looks like?"

"Black GMC Sierra," she said.

"You're the best, Baby Girl. I'm going out to the truck now. I'm parked at the far east end of the lot, about thirty feet from the plant nursery and one row away from the fence with the ads for Captain Morgan Rum. You'll see the front end of the truck; I backed in. You may not see me, but I'll be there, babe."

With a heart thankful for his unfailing kindness, she followed his directions. Ordinarily she would be hoping that she wouldn't look like an idiot. This evening, she wanted to look stupid. The alternative was so much worse….

But the cars behind her shifted off in their little surveillance dance again.

_Once is chance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action._ _Takes two hands to handle a Whopper. Takes three deaths to define a serial killer. I need to think of something healthier than this._

The two miles to Home Depot seemed to take an hour. Every holdup at every light made her heart leap into her throat. Once she saw a man staring into her passenger side window and she mewled in fear, but it was just a poster on the side of a bus stopped beside her, and the face was part of an ad for a syndicated TV comedy.

_Almost wet my panties over Seinfeld, for God's sake…._

_Serial killers don't coordinate with other cars to follow a potential victim. This is the NSA or this is VoD. And the NSA, allegedly, is the good guys. At least, they're supposed to be. God only knows who or what VoD's working for._

_Virgins of Destruction. Vampires of Destiny. Victims of Dahmer. Vegetables of Des Moines._

_Focus!_

By the time she reached Home Depot, her damp palms were slipping on the steering wheel. The car that had been following her didn't turn in there. She pulled to the side and waited for a slow count of ten, but no other vehicle that had been going in her direction entered the lot. Still, she was so nervous that she had to look at the little compass on her dash twice to recall which was east. Once she was oriented she fastened her gaze on the jolly Captain Morgan on the billboard and kept moving slowly and steadily through the parking lot.

Morgan was right there, in jeans and a blue plaid flannel shirt worn over one of his usual brown T-shirts. He was actually standing a few feet away from the front of his truck, right out in the traffic lane. He smiled and waved and indicated that she should stop, but his smile was all wrong.

She stopped anyway.

Derek strolled slowly, lazily, over to the passenger side of her car, looking all around as if warm spring evenings in the parking lot of a big box store were one of his favorite things. He opened the door and slid in beside her.

"Hey, girl," he said, and actually leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. As he did so, he reached into the pocket of his shirt and pulled out a page torn from from his notebook, on which he had printed:

DON'T TALK ABOUT ANYTHING IMPORTANT

"You're so silly," he said, and his voice was so soothing, so affectionate,that it almost negated the weirdness of the note. "That's what I love about you, Baby Girl. Have you eaten dinner yet?"

"Um, no, I was going to warm up some leftover Thai," she replied, figuring the truth was the best way to go here.

"Is there enough for two?"

"Uh, not really, but I can throw a frozen lasagna in the oven instead, if you want. It'll be an hour or two, but—"

"Head out of the parking lot, let's try that Szechuan place where we had JJ's birthday party," Morgan directed. He had his notebook out again and he was scribbling furiously as he spoke. "Right turn, about a mile, left turn. Just past the walk-in clinic."

The next time she stopped for a light, he held up his notebook.

WHEN WE GET OUT OF THE CAR PUT YOUR PURSE AND PHONE IN THE TRUNK.

She suddenly found his presence a lot less comforting.

Thirteen minutes later, he was holding her hands by candlelight over the tablecloth but it was neither love nor lust that glowed in his eyes. "It's like this, Baby Girl," he said softly. "As soon as I got to the truck, there was traffic. The wrong kind of traffic. Cars that pulled into spaces, but nobody got out of them. People are following you, gorgeous. And they're also listening in on your phone calls, and you know what that means."

She certainly did. There was software out there, both legal and il-, enabling a person to listen in on everything that went on around the bluesnarfed mobile unit, as long as the receiver was close enough.

He leaned in urgently, his hands warm and strong around hers. "Who'd you piss off, honey?"

**~ o ~**

New York City

"Mr. Reese?"

"Present and accounted for," his colleague said into his phone with the dark chuckle he loosed at some of the strangest times.

"Is this comfortable for you?" They usually used a dedicated walkie-talkie, but the increased distances involved being in two separate cities necessitated using regular cell phones. Trying to send scrambled signals would, paradoxically, attract more attention rather than less—both the Machine and the NSA feeds it used were designed to take heightened interest in anything that seemed like an attempt to hide communications—so they spoke out in the open. They'd agreed on a few pro code conventions, should things get hot, but for the most part it would be like two buddies chatting.

"Fine so far," Reese reported. "Motel registrations done, the principal subject's sharp, she's abandoned her compromised phone and she's staying out in plain sight. Appears to have a confederate, I'm sending you an image—"

Finch watched the JPG resolve on his screen and checked it against the three most likely of his databases. "Derek Morgan, FBI agent," he told Reese. "Member of our subject's team, the Behavioral Analysis Unit."

"Behavioral Analysis. The profilers." Reese sounded surprised.

"Indeed. She's their tech expert, data mining, analysis, information services." Finch smiled thinly. "She's me, basically."

"Well, Harold, I gotta say—she's prettier."

"Let's hope so, Mr. Reese. Anyway, apparently there's a personal but non-romantic intimacy between our subject and Agent Morgan."

"He's good. He's made both of the guys tailing them. I'm staying out of L-O-S, basically just trailing the trailers at the moment. You get an ID on either of them yet?"

"Not yet, Mr. Reese. Facial identification software's grinding away, doing its job. You'll know as soon as I do."

"More later," the voice in Washington said. "I'm on the move."

In the silence that ensued, Finch returned to previous problems.

As always, he was having money troubles. Finch's trouble, though, was that he just had too damned much of it. Far more even than his default identity, insurance underwriter and reclusive billionaire Harold Wren, ground-floor investor in IFT, was reputed to have. There weren't enough places to hide it all. While a part of him would happily have given some of it away to worthy causes (and Wren was both a generous charitable donor and a regular patron of the arts) the more important parts of him would always fret, _What if I need that to save a Number? _

After all, without so much as batting an eye he'd thrown away almost half a billion dollars buying up shares of Virtanen Pharmaceuticals, setting up Reese as John Rooney, Assets, and punching up the price of Tritek to nail the bastards who'd targeted that prop trader, the Saunders kid at Baylor Zimm. There'd been a glorious surrender in letting go of what he'd fought so hard to acquire in the days when he defined his life with dollar signs, before the Machine gave his life true meaning.

And then it had gone and bitten him in the ass, hadn't it? He'd cleared almost half a billion on short sale of Virtanen alone, and Tritek, now that the fracking scandal was settling down, was quite the little money-maker. So, yeah, he needed ready access to a bundle in liquid assets, but there just weren't enough low profile places to stash it all. It was as though the curse of Midas had settled on him: Whatever he touched, however base and unpromising, inevitably turned to gold.

He didn't micromanage his own fortune; managing his various identities was a more critical occupation. He had money managers for his investments, almost a dozen of them, all of them very good, and only three—those in direct service to Harold Wren—knew about each other—and _they_ didn't know about the other eight.

**~ o ~**

Washington, D.C.

On Sunday morning, Kevin blew into the apartment, ripping his tie off as he did so, dropping a kiss on Penelope's cheek on his way to the bedroom. "Any luck on those names yet?" he asked as ripped off his sport coat and threw it over a chair.

"Do you plan to roost for a few minutes?" she called after him. "Or to you plan to take flight right after your nap, or your shower, or whatever the hell you decided to drop by for?"

Kevin stopped dead, turned around, and parked his butt on the arm of a nearby chair and folded his arms across his chest. "Whew, just a little bit of hostility there, girl?"

"You think?" Garcia snorted. "You're working doubles but you still need me to check names for you? I'm being followed, Lynch! I'm not paranoid, either. Morgan spotted them, two guys, professionals, and that's the just ones he made. Life's getting just a little bit scary here, Boy Wonder."

"Then it's a good thing you're all safe and tucked in with your smoothie here at home," said Lynch. "Is Morgan coming over to watch over you? Maybe you'll get those names done."

"Kev, I don't even know who these guys are supposed to be! Is there something special I'm supposed to be looking for?"

Lynch looked surprised. "Yeah, it was in my first email. Jeez, that was days ago! I'm sure I explained it in my first email."

"No chance, fella. Nothing but a list of names, and 'Hey, honey, can you look these guys up for me?'"

The dude was sweating; he always perspired when cornered. He shoved his glasses back up his nose and smiled. "It's easy. The first thirty-four are potential partners in this Garden State Floral, no, State Floral Garden Guys—Garden something, OK? And Floral something? And the next, what is it? Seven? They're partners in this gym-slash-rec-center that we think might be tied in with our guys. And the last four, they own this private club that we really need to get into and we just can't get a toehold into it. It's like invitation only and they ain't inviting us."

Pen tapped her pen against her keyboard. "So—how many of these guys do you think are crooks?"

Kevin adjusted his glasses again. "The seven, for sure. The thirty-four, they could be innocent investors, victims, for all we know. The last four, well far be it from me to profile, but we know a couple skeevy guys attend the club, and two of the owners have Italian last names."

"Cripes, Lynch, so does Dave Rossi! So does Annie Milanese! You want to go by last names? Maybe I'm an illegal immi—"

"Stop it!" Lynch howled. "Just stop it! Jeez, and you wonder why I don't like hanging around you any more. You just take everything so damn personally!" he stalked out of the room, cursing under his breath.

She wasn't in the least surprised when he emerged from the bedroom a few minutes later with an armload of clean clothes. "I'll shower in the locker room," he grumbled. He collected his jacket and was gone.

**~ o ~**

New York City

Harold Finch consulted his growing database of Weeks's people. "Fred Sawyer," he told his partner in Washington. He was learning entirely too much about the dark world of covert operatives. "Ex-SEAL, dishonorable discharge, ooh, conduct unbecoming, now would that be for real, or would that be part of his legend?"

"Jury's still out on that one," Reese rumbled back at him. "Unbecoming maybe, but certainly not conduct incompetent. Very good. Very good indeed—sending you another image now."

The cell phone arrangement wasn't working as well as they'd hoped, but it was better than nothing. Finch really missed not hearing everything that was happening around where his colleague was. True, as often as not what he heard didn't set his mind at ease—violence and risk seemed to follow Reese around like frisky puppies—but there was a certain solace in being _in the loop_, so to speak, that Finch couldn't explain.

"That didn't come through," Harold said. "Can you re-transmit?"

"Um, problem here, Finch," his partner murmured. "Another team entirely out here. Your little friend attracts shadows like, like—what attracts shadows?" he asked with a chuckle. "They're good. Not quite as good as Sawyer, but no amateurs. Just a minute—"

There were faint sounds of a struggle, then Reese's voice, calm, authoritative. "Hold still. You keep on struggling and it's gonna snap. That's better."

The connection failed.

_Now what?_ Harold Finch thought, knowing that if he called Reese back it might interrupt a situation where he needed his concentration.

Reese called back and Finch opened the connection before the ringtone finished. "I'm here," he snapped.

"Look," Reese seemed to be saying to someone else, "I said I'm sorry. We're all grownups here. Boss," he continued, signaling clearly that they were going into an agreed-upon setup, "Jim Rensselaer here, looks like the Feds are following our boy, too." There was a dull thud like that of a blow landing. "OK, I deserved that—"

"No shit," an unfamiliar voice growled.

"You want to talk to my boss, sir?"

"Who is this?" the unfamiliar voice snarled into the telephone.

Finch pitched his own voice into low, slow, relaxed. Faintest of southern accents. "Ah, this is Bob Stroud," he said, "Logan-Liberty Investigations, licensed in New York, New Jersey, and Metro DC. Who's this? Did you just punch out my operative?"

"It's me again," Reese said. "He's gone. We've, ah, reached an agreement to stay out of each other's way."

"Who was that?" Finch asked.

"Her boss," Reese said. He seemed to be laughing. "A nice left, by the way. I didn't see it coming."


	9. I Want to Talk to Your Boss

****A/N ****I own neither of these shows. Sure wish I did! I'm aware that some of the backstory for _Person of Interest_ may change as the show continues to dribble out clues about things. I'm working with the most recent information I have. Thanks, as ever, to Esperanta the eagle-eyed beta for making me look good.

**Pixels in the Night**

**Chapter Nine **

**I Want to Talk to Your Boss**

New York City

"Mr. Reese!" Harold Finch said, trying—and pretty much failing—to keep the concern out of his voice. "He punched you?"

Reese's laugh was reassuring. But, then, it was designed to reassure. Finch's exceptionally deadly colleague could be hanging upside-down over a pit of, oh, boiling rattlesnakes, or something else equally awful, and he would still give that faint, warm chuckle. "Not a problem, Finch," he replied. "I didn't see it coming, but there was nothing much behind it. For the security of our country—and your little friend—I hope he shoots better than he punches."

Finch turned slightly; he had affixed images of not only the people they had identified as on the job for Weeks, but also Ms. Garcia's coworkers to the work board so he could put faces on all of the people Reese encountered: the scary-looking bald bearded guy she'd first appealed to when she realized she was under surveillance; her faithless boyfriend; her boss, he of the feeble fists.

He'd had little success in penetrating Ms. Garcia's home or work computers—not surprisingly, considering he was ninety-nine-point-some-enormous number of nines sure that she was the notorious Nineties hacker, vectress, with whom the equally gifted international hacker egedn had reputedly enjoyed hours upon hours of high stakes, high-intensity cybersex. This was, the legends had it, always accomplished in locations that up until that moment had been considered "secure" and "hacker-proof" by mere mortals.

Finch had made his first few million building software designed to keep out the likes of egedn and vectress, which just added layers and layers of irony to his life.

"OK," Reese murmured into his phone, "boyfriend's finally clear of the place. Chase and the Nordic-looking no-name are peeling off from the party to follow him. Soccer Mom's chasing Chase."

Soccer Mom—that would be Agent Jennifer Jareau, the blonde with the astonishing big blue eyes.

"Shoestring's approaching the side entrance of the complex," Reese reported.

Dr. Spencer Reid and his geriatric Volvo, Finch noted, and applied himself again to his efforts to identify the "Nordic looking no-name" on Weeks's team. Facial identification software had come up with a whole lot of nothing through the U.S. and British databases. He tapped a few more keys and slid sideways through Interpol's firewalls—some skills, you never lost them—and started the software grinding away again.

"Red's in play," Reese said. "Shoestring has her and Freddy's following them." A pause, a faint chuckle, and he added, "Baldy and Natasha are after Freddy. You know, they're actually damn good, Finch. Your buddy—" meaning Weeks "—has international-class, serious heavyweight people on this, and the locals are managing quite well. Definitely superior to anything the Feds send to the City." Referring to Donnelly's get-Reese work group, which—although it had been expanded from six agents to a mind-numbing eighteen—still functioned barely above the level of a big-city cop shop.

Baldy and Natasha would be Agents Morgan and Prentiss.

_But as to this bunch running rings around Donnelly's operation, well, of course_, Finch thought fretfully. Any unit that had the surpassing good sense to snag Penelope Garcia as its technical analyst would almost certainly function on an exceptionally high level.

"I'm off, joining the parade," Reese announced. "And Natasha winked at me." Finch wasn't sure whether John sounded more bemused, insulted, or intrigued.

Well, good. Finally—someone who could keep Reese off-balance.

He was a little less surprised a few minutes later, when his little intrusion into Interpol came up with both an ID on Nordic-looking no-name—a Bulgarian freelancer named Yuriy Gorsky—and "Natasha," who was apparently an Interpol undercover operative, Lauren Reynolds.

The _late_ Lauren Reynolds.

This "thing" with Ms. Garcia just got more interesting by the minute.

**~ o ~**

Washington, D.C.

Penelope settled happily in behind her monitor screens. Sunday or not, she was at her most contented when she was here, doing what she did best. Besides, if she was here, the Team would stand down and get on with their lives, instead of protecting her against the entities who pursued her.

As she picked a little of the crust off her sweet roll, her first information request arrived.

"Garcia," Aaron Hotchner's voice said, "what can you tell me about Robert Stroud?"

"That depends, _mon capitaine_," she purred into her stalk mike. "Is this the historical Robert Stroud, or a modern day doofus with the same name?"

"This would be a modern day d—_person_," Aaron Hotchner corrected himself. "And of _course_, that's where I heard the name before. Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz. I just was out at his website—the modern Stroud, this modern Stroud, anyway—and his outfit looked legit to me. But I'm not the, ah, oracle of all things technical."

"And you don't have to be," she teased, "because you have me." She tapped a few keys. "Oh, a nice little site, well organized, let me see—well, so far, all the links seem to work, and they have, like, actual content."

"Translate, please."

"Of course, _mon brave_. The first thing to look for with fake or spoof sites is broken links. It seems to have links to all these different topics or areas, but when you click on them you 404 your little tushie." She spent one-nineteenth of a second wondering whether referring to her superior's tushie, little or not, was appropriate, before deciding _oh, screw it_ and plunging on ahead. "One step of organization up from that is, there's content, but it's minimal or it's all boilerplate or it's literally cut and pasted nonsense from some other source.

"Logan-Liberty appears to be a genuine PI service, mostly IT—most PI agencies go IT these days, not much gumshoe left in the business, more's the pity, my fine furry friend. Licensed in New York, New Jersey, and the District, with associates in, wow, eight other states. And Bob Stroud is, yes, one of three acting directors of operations."

"Look for James Rensselaer." He spelled it, not that she needed the help, having many techie contacts who'd emerged from Rensselaer Polytechnic's computer science department.

"He's right here, a Jim Rensselaer's on the list here as a stringer for on-the-ground ops, he specializes, it says, in consumer security. That's shoplifting and crooked store clerks, sir—"

"I know that part, Garcia."

She heard the grin in his voice and didn't apologize.

"Sir, if you can give me a context for these guys, it would help me fine-tune my search."

There was a longish pause on the other end of the line, then Hotchner said, "The guys who are following you—the guys Morgan made—Rensselaer's following _them_."

"Wow, how'd you find that out?"

Another awkward pause. "Can I just say, well, that's a long story, and leave it at that?"

"You _do_ arouse my curiosity, sir," she said, but Hotch didn't take the bait, so she let it drop.

Besides, she was the oracle of all knowledge. With one glittery finger, she tapped speed-dial.

"My chocolate prince?" she said when Morgan answered. "Our Fearless Leader tells me that there's some private investigator chasing the people who are chasing me. Is this the truth?"

Morgan gave a short laugh. "Yeah, it's true all right."

"When I asked him how he found this out, he just said it was a long story. My Prince, you know how I love a long story, especially when I think someone is being—evasive."

"You're merciless, Baby Girl," Morgan told her. "Mr. PI and Mr. Hotchner had a close encounter a few hours ago in which both of them thought they were playing for the other team. Mr. PI twisted Hotch's arm, and Hotch punched him out on general principles."

_No. Stuff like that doesn't happen to me. Or around me._

"This would be—" she pulled up the Logan-Liberty site's photo of Jim Rensselaer "—the tall, distinguished hunk with classic features, graying hair, and eyes as squinty as Hotch's?"

"Yes, Baby Girl," Morgan said with another laugh. "That would be. Gotta go now, Gorgeous. We're trailing a non-friendly."

**~ o ~**

New York City

The man who preferred to be Harold Finch watched the oversized ceramic mug revolving in the tiny microwave at their library headquarters. He found it amusing—and fitting, in an odd kind of way—that he, one of the wealthiest men in the country, was having the same dinner as thousands of starving college students: nuked ramen noodles and a can of diet cola.

He'd never been a starving college student. By the time he hit MIT, he was already engaged in hiding assets. Not every phone phreaker did it just to stick it to the Man; as Harold Wren, he'd done it primarily for profit. He'd been designing, building and marketing his own "blue boxes," illegal devices enabling users to place unlimited free long-distance phone calls, since he was twelve.

The responsible adults in his life had believed the determined young man in his thick glasses was building and selling custom bird houses. He'd built a bunch of them, too, just to maintain his cover; he was remarkably adept with his hands. He'd been multiple people since the age of nine—hating himself, hating who and what he was—and identity shifts were now as natural to him as breathing.

The microwave beeped. He removed the mug, added the contents of the optimistically named "flavor packet," and stirred the noodles as he wandered back to his computer station.

His return was perfectly timed. He'd no sooner sat down than Reese was calling.

"Progress?" he said. He and Reese never bothered with time-wasting fripperies like _hello_ and _good-bye_ and _how's it going_.

"Successfully bluesnarfing Shoestring," Reese reported. "He's taking her back to her place, and she's driving herself to a strip mall, shopping for something for 'the little guy,' which I'm interpreting as Soccer Mom's kid—"

"She and Shoestring are his godparents," Finch confirmed. "She burbles about it a bit in her blog."

"—and I'm relocating to the mall. Baldy and Natasha seem pretty dependable."

"Natasha's quite the little surprise," Finch said, knowing that Reese would know better than to expect him to speak openly about it. "Details to come."

"We've got some weather starting here," Reese added. "Everyone's job just got a few degrees harder."

"Stay dry," Finch said, and it was probably as close to a farewell as he was likely to give.

He addressed himself to his computer programs then, failing yet again to get past Garcia's firewalls—little minx was using some of his own code, but she'd tweaked it in some totally unexpected directions—but gaining access to the Bureau's general in-house bulletin boards. Penelope's unit, the BAU, had a notice up there for all field offices:

_ISO (1) all assaults and homicides (2) in last week of calendar month, involving (3) victims who had cosmetic surgery within the last 2-3 years, (4) robbery, blackmail, fraud, extortion significant $ amounts (5) significant facial damage inflicted on victim any 4/5 please route to_ … and Garcia's station was referenced.

Finch spent a few minutes in national databases, essentially following in Garcia's footsteps as she connected the dots among three crimes that only looked related once one added in all the components she had listed in her request. What she did, he realized, was not all that very different from what he and Mr. Reese did. Of course, the BAU came on the scene with all the authority of the Bureau, which was an advantage, and with all those pesky laws, which was a disadvantage.

The tiny part of him that remained a dreamer wondered for a moment what life would be for Mr. Reese and himself, and the BAU, if they were able somehow to join forces.

_Nonsense,_ his rational side reminded him immediately—_this is the agency that has sent New York City eighteen allegedly top agents for the sole purpose of capturing John Reese._

_It's a pity, though_, the dreamer within muttered before vanishing below the surface again.

**~ o ~**

Washington, D.C.

The wind caught in her umbrella and it promptly snapped inside-out. With a squeal as the rain hit her head and shoulders full force, she dashed for the shelter of a nearby awning—and, of course, because she couldn't be graceful if her life depended on it, she stabbed a passing elderly man, then a toddler in a stroller, with her damaged and sopping wet umbrella.

"Shit, shit, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she panted, backing into yet someone else. She struggled fruitlessly with the miserable thing for a few seconds, then a hand appeared from behind her.

"Allow me," a voice said. Nice voice, but it came from behind her, and coming from behind her, even the nicest voices scared her. Especially nice voices that chuckled. A confident right hand reached out and tugged the umbrella from her hand.

She spun, on high alert.

He was tall, forties, graying. London Fog coat hanging open, suit but no tie. He wrestled the umbrella back to usefulness, gave it a shake, and handed it back to her.

"Thank you," she said.

"No problem," he said. He smiled at her, then turned his attention back to staring moodily out into the streets.

She looked back at him once before plunging back into pedestrian traffic—and realized that she had seen that face before. Hadn't he been—the guy on the website? The guy Hotch had her look up? She looked more closely. There was a small swollen place on his lower lip.

_Ooooookie dokie._

She decided to stand her ground. "Mr. Rensselaer, I presume," she said.

"That's a good call, Penelope," he said with a slow smile. Dark, velvety voice with a hint of a chuckle behind it.

_And I've heard that voice before, too!_

She stared at him mutely until she placed the voice, then wondered whether he'd answered that phone because he was a good guy or a bad guy.

_Screw it. I can't spend my life running. _

"So," she said, trying to keep her voice light, relaxed—and still be heard over the storm that thundered down on the awning, "did you give Harold the message?"

He jerked just slightly (_in surprise?_) and laughed out loud. "Right. The, ah, the neutered dog that needed his shots. Yes, I did."

"Good. And—how is little Reese doing?"

Rensselaer seemed to be fighting an urge to laugh again. "He's fine," he said. "I think he's grown himself a new pair, but otherwise, he's fine. Frisky. Ready to play."

She gathered her courage. "Tell me about Harold."

His smile became thinner. "He's a very private person."

"This is important," she insisted. "Did he hire Robert Stroud?"

"I'm not privy to that kind of information, Penelope."

"I need to contact him!"

"I'll pass the word along," Rensselaer said. "Really, I will. In fact—" He hit speed dial on his cell phone. "I have Ms. Garcia with me," he said into the phone, without greeting anyone or identifying himself. "She would like to speak to Harold. Can that be arranged?"

With a fleeting smile, he handed the cell to Garcia.

"Hello?" she said.

"Oh, dear," an unfamiliar voice, an older man's voice, said with a sigh. "Dragons, Ms. Garcia. Here there be dragons."

She felt as though she'd been hit by lightning, stunned, rooted to the spot, amazed that she was still alive. _I'm talking to VoD! _A thousand questions vied for primacy, but she asked the one that was most immediately important. "Did you hire Robert Stroud?" she said.

"That's a fair assumption," VoD replied smoothly.

"You're Harold."

"When I find it convenient."

"Then who are you really?"

"I think 'VoD' sums it up rather well, Ms. Garcia."

Feeling like someone plummeting off a cliff, she said, "What would you say to me if I said 'ko ko'?"

There was a significant pause, then VoD said, "I would say, 'Who's there?'"

"But it means testicles!" she blurted.

"In Swahili," VoD replied, his tone still utterly serene. "In Tswana, it means, 'knock knock.'"

_I'm not just speaking to VoD. I'm talking to freaking egedn! He's not dead! This is the totally coolest moment in the history of my life since my arrest._

Then she recalled some of the most exciting moments she had ever shared with egedn—and she found herself blushing. She had never, ever, in her whole life been so shameless, so hot, so uninhibitedly, joyously seductive as she had as vectress. And this man—knew every word she had typed?

_Yeah, well, he was pretty explicit himself_, she reminded herself.

"I need to speak to Mr. Rensselaer again," VoD said. "The world is still an unsafe place."

"But I have questions!"

"Everyone has questions, Ms. Garcia. Questions are cheap. You can pick them up on the street for nothing. Mr. Rensselaer, please." It was the tone of a man accustomed to being obeyed.

"Fine." She handed the phone back to the tall man. "It's for you."

He smiled. He seemed to have dozens of smiles, all sort of alike, yet weirdly different—and none of them was really encouraging. "Thank you, Penelope."

_What now? I'm supposed to walk away from this? I was talking to the two coolest people I've ever met online, one whom I've been kind of in love with for fourteen years, and they're the same person? And I'm supposed to just put up my umbrella and go get my car and go home like this never happened?_

Rensselaer thumbed the phone off without saying anything to VoD and put it back in his pocket. "Have a nice day, Penelope," he said. Smile Number Twenty-Six. Or Eighty-One.


	10. The Icarus Gate

****A/N ****I own neither of these shows. Sure wish I did! I'm aware that some of the backstory for _Person of Interest_ may change as the show continues to dribble out clues about things. I'm working with the most recent information I have. A big thank you to Esperanta-the-beta, who got me watching PoI in the first place! Custom cover image by Hank Roll, thank you so much!

**Pixels in the Night**

**Chapter Ten **

**The Icarus Gate**

New York City

He ran his fingers through his hair a few times—something he knew he shouldn't do, with all that goop in it—and poured himself a small glass of brandy. That was something else he had no business doing, given both his responsibilities and the level of painkillers he was using that particularly damp evening, trying to dull the ferocious ache in every affected joint.

He thought back to his hacker days and his heart ached. Those glorious velvety nights when the two of them danced barefoot (virtually speaking) behind firewalls too puny to hold them back because they were too smart, too determined, too blessed to be denied—and eventually she would pop up in IRC. Even then, although she was a stranger to upper-case letters, she eschewed shorthand and the phony intimacy of _l337-speak_.

It would always begin the same way:

vectress: _what are you wearing? _

egedn: _feathers, my love_

vectress: _then i'll have to singe them off _

egedn: _dare you_

His heart pounding with recalled passions, he let his gaze drift over at the three images of Penelope Garcia he had dared to print out and post. He had another twenty-nine on his hard drive, safe from Reese's well-meaning but prying eyes.

He'd never had any irrefutable evidence that vectress was actually, physically, a female when they were sharing sweet intimacies online. For all he'd known, vectress could've been some bald fat sweaty Finn or German guy in his grandmother's cellar, but he had believed that she was young, whip-smart, a fiery redhead with smoldering eyes.

And she had been. Good God, the first time she had stripped him of his feathers, the first time she had let her silken robe slip off her ivory shoulders for him, she had been sixteen years old, beyond his wildest fantasies! The frightening question, however, was what she had believed she was talking to. Probably, she'd envisioned some goth godling, a Kurt Cobain of computing. Certainly she'd understood that he could be a fat, balding old dude in his mom's basement—or what she was really engaging with, a middle-aged geek in thick glasses. She probably hadn't envisioned the penthouse or the designer suit, but those things had meant nothing to vectress.

vectress: _why do you tremble when I touch you?_

egedn: _because your touch is magical—but so is mine_

vectress: _you give off heat like a furnace, like a solar flare_

egedn: _it can be yours if you'll just give yourself; the world is yours if you just ask_

A faint ping interrupted his reverie. He raised his eyes to his monitor and saw that they had a new Number. A new Number, and Reese was off in D.C., watching Weeks's people, twisting FBI agents' arms, and actually standing right next to Penelope Garcia.

He wondered whether she wore perfume. He would never have the nerve to ask Reese about that, though.

With a deep sigh, hoping the new Number was another easy one, he entered the digits into his search engines.

And gasped.

And the more he discovered, the more distressed he became.

**~ o ~**

Washington, D.C.

For every bit of bad news, there's generally a piece of good news. What bites is that the reverse is also generally true.

So—on the so-very-plus side, she had spoken to VoD, _quite an astonishing voice, so much to glean from it, and on top of it all, he's either egedn or knows way too much about him_.

On the minus side: Kevin Lynch had not been working double shifts. He had another little honey on the side, the dirtbag!

On the _mehhh_ side, however, was the sudden knowledge that she couldn't give less of a crap about who—or what—Kevin was getting down and funky with. He, she, or it was welcome to him. Toward the end, the only things she'd really liked about him was that in the right light, and from the right angle, he looked sorta like Starcat from that surfing movie.

Once she got Henry's gifts wrapped, she took a long bubble bath, touched up the red at her roots, wrapped herself in her silkiest, sexiest robe, poured herself a glass of chilled Chablis, and punched up her databases.

Since it was a cinch Kevin wasn't doing his job, which was why he needed her to do it for him—but as long as he was kicking in a third of her rent and utilities, it behooved her to ensure that he kept his job for just a little bit longer—she would finish up that list of people that he'd asked her to investigate.

She decided to start with the four people who were listed as owners of the private New York City club, _La Strega Siciliana_. To start with, yeah, "The Sicilian Witch" could certainly hint at a Mob presence; the entity frequently referred to as Cosa Nostra ("Our Thing") had its earliest beginnings in Sicily. But millions and millions of perfectly benign people and things had begun in Sicily, too.

First up: Strega was certainly a "loss leader" of some kind. Huge-name performers routinely (and very quietly) popped in to provide an evening's entertainment, in much the way huge-name acts showed up to perform corporate gigs and the celebrations of the appallingly rich. But those name acts were paid what they'd pull in at a standard concert. Unless the club itself was huge—even if, as was entirely likely, its patrons plunked down an easy five-figures for a night's entertainment—it bled money.

So…a money laundry?

Four owners, and their roles were fairly well defined given their backgrounds: Edwin LaSelva, scion of the LaSelva industrial chemicals dynasty, who in spite of his Italian name had not a whiff of Mob involvement in his genes; Marcus Griffith, way, way old New York money through his big-name mother, plus the whole Skull and Bones thing; Lana Whitby, no doubt where her talents lay—she'd bailed from one of the biggest artist management companies a few years earlier; and Geraldo Falcone, who was, frankly, a nonentity, but who appeared to be the main money man.

That's where the problems will be, Garcia realized. She turned the full force of her mad data mining skillz toward Geraldo Giancarlo Falcone, age 53, born in New Jersey, divorced, made a bundle on stocks and futures, most recently profiting from the fall of Virtanen Pharma to the tune of a few hundred million. Didn't profile like Mob; profiled like a money manager. When she dipped further into his life, she learned that he supported public TV and radio, was on the board of a couple high-profile animal rights organizations. She wasn't a forensic accountant, but she sensed that Falcone probably lost a lot of money on Strega, which meant that he was either laundering funds through it or using his involvement to buy an entree into the upper levels of New York society through it.

Personally, she suspected the latter. Money alone didn't buy you access to nosebleed-level artists, politicians, and entertainers. Providing the deep pockets for Strega bought access. Garcia was a hacker; access was everything to her.

Loft apartment in an old building, a graceful building, managed by Tripletex-Eastspace Group, a subsidiary of Pear Tree Equity—_huh, the same people who own Harold Jay's place on Staten Island, but it's a huge damn company, so nothing significant there._

Subscriber to _New Yorker, Barron's, Rolling Stone, Wired, Variety, Forbes, _all reasonable for a money man who pays for entertainment_… _and_ Cat Fancy_.

Owns a neutered male gray tabby named Reese.

_OK, now, that's just too weird._

Reese isn't that uncommon a name; there's Reese Witherspoon, after all. But she's a female. And this is a male. And so is Harold Jay's Reese, the neutered male beagle.

And Geraldo equals Harold.

And Giancarlo is John Carl, which starts with a J.

Harold Jay.

And…stretching the coincidences, a Jay and a Falcon are both birds.

Her genius lay in daring to make goofy associations, so she backed up and looked at the other entity the two men had in common: Pear Tree Equity—and its CEO, Harold Matheson Partridge. _Right, partridge in a pear tree, oh we're just too freakin' cute for our own good, aren't we, Harold?_

She'd appeared in the chorus of her high school's production of _Kiss Me, Kate_ ("Another op'ning, another show") and now she found herself crooning, "Another Harold, another bird…" to the same tune.

Partridge had a co-op in the city and an estate in the Hamptons—_oh, my God, there's money just dripping off this guy_—two ex-wives, three polo ponies (none of them named Reese) but he was the right age.

For the first time in at least ten years, she entered "egedn" into all the search engines she could think of. Other than a few histories of the hacker phenomenon, there was nothing. She sighed deeply. She'd really thought she had something there, for a minute.

_OK, fine_, she decided. _One more try._

She reversed the letters and popped them into—_let's start simple_—Google.

And sat there for a long time, her heart pounding.

_Ngede_. Swahili for airplane. Or bird.

_And I'm the only person in the world who could make that connection and understand it._

**~ o ~**

"Harold?" the familiar voice panted into his earpiece.

_Panting is rarely good._

"Is everything going well, Mr. Reese?"

"It is now." One of those damned chuckles.

"You haven't manhandled any more FBI agents, have you?"

Yet another chuckle. "You're surprisingly protective of the agency currently mounting a huge operation that runs counter to your interests."

"Only _particular_ agents, Mr. Reese. Are you planning to tell me the purpose of this delightful but unexpected call?"

_Does she wear perfume? And if so, what scent? Because when I die I want it in my nostrils._

"Now that Freddy and Yuriy are out of the picture, they're doubling down. They've brought in some new talent. Images on their way. First one's five-eleven, one-seventy, second's more like five-six, one-forty."

Two faces resolved in .JPG format on Finch's screens. Neither was immediately identifiable, but he sicced his analytical software on both faces right away. "In progress, Mr. Reese. Is everyone critical tucked in for the night?"

"Small domestic drama playing out here," Reese replied. "Boyfriend got kicked out of Sleek's apartment about half an hour ago. He showed up at Red's, but she's locked him out."

It was Finch's turn to chuckle. _Good for you, girl. _"Is he likely to be a problem?"

"Depends. He's already called all his female acquaintances looking for a flop for the night and now he's calling the males."

"If necessary, front him money for a motel," Finch said. "We don't want him doing anything fatuous like kicking her door down."

"Wouldn't happen," said Reese. "I doubt he could kick his way into—or out of—a phone booth."

"There are no enclosed phone booths anymore, Mr. Reese."

Another chuckle. "My point exactly. If he gets desperate, I'll help him out, though."

They closed off the call.

Finch considered drinking another cup of tea, but he decided the only thing he needed less than alcohol was caffeine.

Because he was, at bottom, obsessive, he took one last crack at Garcia's Bureau computer. He was still locked out with his own software, since IFT had created Solaraion, to which she had made her own tweaks. He could probably get in, but he would leave tracks. Tracks could be very effective, a hell of a message, but he wasn't interested in that kind of message. The most successful hackers were persistent, so he tried her home computer once more before giving up to try another day.

She ran Solaraion on her home computer, too—but there was a hole.

His heart thundered. The hole hadn't been there previously. Solaraion had been around in its various iterations since '96; it had been IFT's first huge seller, one of those projects where he was being paid to design software to keep himself out. He'd left himself a hole—_don't look so surprised; we all do it! You would, too!_—he could exploit if he had to. Or if he felt like it. He'd called it, for obvious reasons, the Icarus Gate.

Vectress had discovered it on her own, the only hacker he knew who had stumbled across it because her mind worked like his. So, of course, once she was working for the white hats, or at least the nearest equivalent to them in her eyes, she'd cemented shut the Icarus Gate.

And now it was open on her home computer.

That had not happened by accident.

In programming terms, vectress had let her silken robe slip off her ivory shoulders, allowing him a peek into the promises beyond.

But had she opened it to invite him in, or to trap him?

He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. _God damn it, vectress, you still own me._

**~ o ~**

Washington D.C.

Her telephone rang at 2:44 AM.

She groped for the handset, waited for the second ring—only to discover that the number was blocked.

"Hello?" she said cautiously.

The older man's voice said, "I'm wearing feathers." His tone was tense and grave. "Listen to me carefully, please. There's a young woman in Greenwich Village named Carissa Melton-Flynn. She's 22, a short, pudgy blonde who had rhinoplasty six months ago. She arranged with her broker today to sell the shares of BP she inherited from her great aunt. That should net her around seven thousand dollars if the value doesn't plummet overnight."

"Repeat, please," she said, flicking on the lamp and reaching for a pen and a loose piece of paper.

"Carissa Melton-Flynn," he said, and spelled it and gave her exact address. "Rhinoplasty in October, arranged to sell her stocks—and they're her entire inheritance," he added. "In the vicinity of seven thousand."

"You've read our bulletin board."

"It's laughably accessible."

"It is." She sat up in bed. "When did she die?"

"She hasn't, Ms. Garcia. I thought the different angle might be of some use to you. I can't guarantee that this isn't just an awkward and misleading coincidence—life's full of them—but it was close enough that I could not in good conscience keep silent."

"You know that I have to ask you who you are."

"Of course you do," VoD said.

"And you aren't going to answer me, are you?"

"You have a unique grasp of the obvious, my dear."

The line went dead.

She climbed out of bed and kick-started her computers. After a rapid search of her own, she speed-dialed another familiar number.

"Yes, Garcia?" a barely-awake Aaron Hotchner croaked at her.

"Sir, I think I may have the face-ripping guy's next victim. She's in New York City, the Village. I can't prove to you how I got the information, but the more I look at it, the more compelling it looks. And she's already making the arrangements to come up with the money, and it's all she has, so it's important, it's significant, and he's made contact. There's nothing else in her life right now that would justify that kind of need for liquid assets."

"What do you mean, you can't prove how you got the information?" _Trust Hotch to zero in on the awkward part._

"I mean, sir, that if it goes to trial I'll have to say I did a massive search and came upon her by accident. I have a couple hacker friends who've been on the alert for that combination, too, and the nature of our relationship is we trust information and don't identify ourselves."

"And did you actually do a massive search?"

She considered that. Technically, she had. And contacting her…friend…had been a part of it. "Yes, sir."

"Then we're covered," said Hotch. "This is pretty thin to send the Team in, you know. But I'd rather we show up than we engage the locals."

"You're—you're going to act on this? It could be—" How had egedn phrased it? "—an awkward and misleading coincidence," she finished.

"Act on it, and bring you along," he replied.

"Me?"

"We're not leaving you here alone and unguarded for whoever the hell in the NSA's tracking you. Besides, that'll allow your mystery angel, Mr. Rensselaer, to return to his home territory."

Ah, right. Mr. Rensselaer—who knows Harold of the Thousand Names.

"My go-bag—I need to repack it—" she began.

"Do it. Maybe we'll get lucky, get out in front of this guy—"

"Yes, sir," she said, added her good-byes and hung up.

She swung back through her previous searches and located a number. When she connected with the voice mail of Geraldo Giancarlo Falcone, she said, "The FBI needs a table for four at Strega for Tuesday night. You know where to send the deets."

_There. Now _you_ have something to worry about._


	11. The Dance of Access

****A/N ****I own neither of these shows. Sure wish I did! I'm aware that some of the backstory for _Person of Interest_ continues to change (*cough* Grace Hendricks). Huge thanks, as always, to Esperanta, who introduced me to _Person of Interest_ and who makes my scribbles readable.

**Pixels in the Night**

**Chapter Eleven**

**The Dance of Access**

**New York City**

There was no way he would sleep tonight. This morning. Whatever the heck it was. He rolled carefully to his side, automatically shifting pillows to keep his upper spine protected, and stared glumly at the silver and gray art deco paper on—_wait, who am I tonight? Right, him_—on Harold Alan Madden's bedroom wall. (Madden wasn't really a bird name, but it suggested "cuckoo." You work with what you have.)

He hugged the longest and softest of the pillows close to his chest and realized that he was thinking of Penelope Garcia.

_Fool. Deluded, pathetic, damaged fool._

What would happen when the FBI asked Garcia how her source knew that Ms. Melton-Flynn was at risk? When she asked him? Nothing, not even the estimable Ms. Garcia dancing stark naked on an amaretto cheesecake, could induce him to admit the existence of the Machine.

He'd done the stupid thing, the young man's thing. He'd surrendered to impulse, and now everything he and John Reese worked for was at risk.

He sat up, also carefully, gripping his shins and moving his spine as one unbending unit, and planted his bare feet on Harold Madden's shaggy throw rug. Madden was a bit of a Luddite, a technophobe, or maybe he was just Alicia-Corwin-level paranoid; Finch hadn't yet decided. He preferred a wired landline, not even a cordless phone, and had only wired internet access for his geriatric Dell desktop that still ran—Harold shuddered slightly—Windows ME, that appalling kludge of an operating system that had managed to get everything wrong.

Mr. Madden might only have his elderly desktop, but Mr. Finch, Servant of the Machine, could never be too far from his sources. He opened the laptop he'd brought with him and began to connection-shop among the wi-fi networks of his neighbors. He decided on TannedNoCalGal's network, with its dependable and easily deduced—given the posters on her door—password, _mttamalpais75_, for his middle-of-the-night explorations.

Before he could pick his way through a maze of proxy servers, his cell phone vibrated. "Yes," he rasped to Mr. Reese, tucked away safely somewhere near Georgetown.

"Things happening here," said the familiar purred baritone. "Still no luck bluejacking Red, but Shoestring was called in; they're gathering at Quantico at six-thirty and leaving for New York City an hour later."

Finch's eyes widened in dismay. He needed Reese back in the City to watch over Ms. Melton-Flynn, but it seemed that Penelope Garcia's own team was abandoning her as well. _Oh, dear._ Now he had to figure out how he was to protect both the new Number and Garcia, his fiery-haired vectress.

"Harold?" Reese prompted gently.

_She chose to pursue the Machine even after I warned her away,_ he told himself sorrowfully. _My greater responsibility is to our new Number._

"It's time to return, Mr. Reese," he said, and the words were hard to say, so hard. "We have a new number."

"Baldy's hanging around Red's place, well positioned," Reese told him. "I'm presuming he'll be called in, too, but I don't know for sure yet."

"They seem to have called in the entire Team," said Finch. "They're coming here."

"Maybe we should find a way to get Red to the City, too."

"One moment, Mr. Reese," Finch murmured. Even as he'd spoken to his partner, his fingers had continued their dance, and he was through Garcia's Icarus Gate. She was so bright, so warm, so—_stop it. _He retraced a few of Garcia's steps. She seemed to have cracked through a few of his names more effectively than anyone ever had before.

He backtracked and checked his voicemail listing for his various identities. One of them made his brow furrow and his heart skip a beat.

"One more moment," said Finch. He tucked an earbud in his right ear and tapped _play_ on one message.

_Perfect. Beyond perfect._

He tapped a few more keys.

"It's done, Mr. Reese," he said, his voice reflecting none of his surprise or gratitude. "She's part of the contingent coming to New York."

"That's quick work," Reese said with an appreciative chuckle.

Things had just gotten a lot more interesting.

**~ o ~**

**Washington, D.C.**

"Garcia?"

For the second time that night, she blinked sleep from her eyes. "Sir?" Her bedside clock said 4:29 AM.

"Can you explain this email?"

"I'm sorry, sir?"

Hotchner sighed. "It's CC'ed to everyone on the Team, including you, with a copy also going to Chief Strauss."

"I'm sorry, sir, but believe it or not I don't wake up in the middle of the night to read my email."

"I don't either," Hotch groused. "But apparently Chief Strauss does."

She sat up cross-legged in bed. "I don't suppose you could read it to me, sir?"

"It's—some sort of acknowledgement of a complimentary table for eight at a place called La Strega Siciliana on Wednesday evening, a place I'm told that White Collar is desperate to get access to, guests to include, well, the entire Team and Strauss. That would be including you. Formal attire required, limo service provided. Strauss is absolutely beside herself—not sure whether her people have bagged a coup or this is some sort of setup."

_Table for eight. Holy freakin' crap…._

She rubbed her eyes. "My best guess is that it's for real, sir. I have—a contact in New York—"

"One of your hacker friends?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then this is some kind of hack? It isn't on the up and up?"

"Sir, not all hackers are, you know, greasy kids living on pizza and Red Bull in somebody's basement or attic. And this one—he's, um, he's pretty well off and he has amazing contacts. And I asked him, could he, like, get us in at Strega, and—he hadn't got back to me yet, but obviously he was able to pull it off. Just the fact that everyone's identified by name tends to indicate that."

"I don't suppose you can share the identity of this contact with me, at least informally?"

"Sure," she said with a weary sigh. "Just between us, though. I'll deny it officially until I hear otherwise from my contact. He's Geraldo Falcone. He's one of the four owners of Strega."

"Oh," Hotchner said, and it sounded completely inadequate. "And he's a _hacker_?"

"I—well, it kind of depends on how you define it, but, yeah."

"Then I suppose he'd know if this was on the up and up."

_What on earth have I put into play here?_ "That would be a fairly good guess, sir, yes."

Hotchner sighed deeply. "Strauss probably isn't going to stop dancing anytime between now and Wednesday evening."

"For what it's worth, sir, I just said, could I get a table for four for Tuesday, not Wednesday, never mentioned any names, so this is his idea, not mine, sir. You can't blame me for Chief Strauss's, ah, attack of the twinkletoes."

Something between and snort and a laugh. "Better be ready early, we've canceled the trips to the Midwest, and Strauss is tagging along. Looks like wheels up at nine-thirty rather than seven-thirty."

"Mmph, all right—oh, and sir?"

"Yes?"

"Does this mean I have to bring a long dress?"

"Reasonable assumption, Garcia."

_Wow. Just…wow._

**~ o ~**

**New York City**

Sleep had, indeed, proved impossible.

The bits of him that were Harold Madden placed an international phone call and filled out an application for renter's insurance with a new company. He paid three bills the old-fashioned way, with checkbook, stamps, and return-address stickers from the previous Christmas. He pushed a few of the lighter bits of furniture around so that different lamps shone in two of his windows. He reprogrammed the hub that turned lights and appliances on and off and deleted everything in Madden's DVR queue.

As the first rays of dawn peeked over the eastern horizon and he occupied that flat gray area between identities, he prepared to eat a solitary breakfast in a mom-and-pop diner with wi-fi. While he waited for the day's special, the Greek omelet, he danced nimbly from proxy server to proxy server until not even Ms. Garcia—not even _he_, were positions reversed—could have tracked him down.

Once he was past the gate Ms. Garcia was continuing to keep open for him—and he was of two minds about that, oh, goodness, but he was of two minds!—he wasted no time poking around idly. He selected huge chunks of her five most recent and active searches and copied them to his own laptop. While the transfer ran in the background, he opened a favorite cover-up, a Twitter timeline that followed the stodgiest, most boring financial news feeds he could find—and when it came to things financial, it took a _lot_ to bore him.

The only cell phone that truly mattered vibrated. He took it from his vest pocket and tried for a calm voice. "I trust all goes well," he said.

"So far, so good," said the man who called himself Mr. Reese. "I had a talk with Baldy; he's committed to getting Red to the plane. I'm in a cab en route to Union Station. I'll catch a few winks on the train home."

But they aren't _you_, a voice within Harold Finch protested. "You're sure these people can be trusted?" _And since when does Mr. Reese sleep? And why does this surprise me? How did I manage to give myself the impression that he's an automaton?_

"They're dedicated," Reese assured him. "Baldy was her first responder. This is as tight an outfit as I've ever observed."

"I trust your judgment, Mr. Reese."

_I have to._

After the owner's teenage daughter brought him his omelet—and barely restrained herself from rolling her eyes at his painfully boring Twitter feed—he tabbed back to Ms. Garcia's top five recent searches.

_You just don't stop, do you, vectress? _

She'd pursued not one, not two, but six of his identities. She'd no doubt have chased them further if each of them hadn't ended in a sea of impeccable real-world references from well-respected credit agencies, security outfits, and employment services. It would take a forensic auditor weeks, even with a great run of luck, to determine that each of those companies was a wholly owned subsidiary of something that—way, way up the food chain—Harold Wren or Harold Partridge controlled.

The thing that identified the owners of La Strega Siciliana fascinated him. While he was surely no innocent—he knew that some of its guests had made their money the old-fashioned way, by stealing it—he'd been unaware of the extent of their operations. It seemed that several NYPD investigations had been scotched at a low level thanks to meddling from both Elias and the entity known as HR. While he gained no direct access to the main store of information White Collar and Organized Crime had assembled on this bunch, he could infer the basic outlines of the evidence from some of the questions Garcia was asking the databases.

_Interesting._

**~ o ~**

**Somewhere over New Jersey**

The only thing stranger than being on the jet with the Team—sorry, being on the jet with the Team and Section Chief Erin Strauss—was the collection of long gowns and dinner jackets, all swathed in plastic, that swayed on their hangers in the alcove beside the coffee pot. Oh, and Penelope was also pretty sure that on most BAU flights to a crime scene, the women weren't discussing shoes.

She recalled how the fictional Hannibal Lecter had called out the FBI trainee for her "good bag and cheap shoes." She was pretty sure that, however well put together she might be, at La Strega Siciliana, she would look like the pudgy goofball that she was.

_And _he'll_ be there. Egedn will be there. Or maybe not. _Probably he preferred to do his magic from behind his screen. Money men could be like that: reclusive. Private. And this guy's real ID was hidden behind so many screens she couldn't even hazard a guess as to who he was or what he looked like.

But Rensselaer called him Harold—which was probably the name he used when he dealt with the PI outfit, what was it? Logan-Liberty, something like that. It was altogether possible that he was none of the people he seemed to be. Harold Jay, Harold Partridge, Geraldo Falcone—all of those men seemed, in terms of their digital presence, to be real people with real jobs and real lives and real apartments. Homes, even. Ex-wives, yachts, and freaking polo ponies. It would take some kind of insanely reclusive individual to juggle all those identities. He'd have no time for anything else. Not to mention, it would cost him a freaking fortune.

No. Egedn had a bird fetish of some kind, and so he targeted these men, men with names that satisfied him on some weird level. He borrowed their identities so smoothly that they didn't even know they were being life-jacked.

_I hope to God this isn't the stupidest thing I've ever done in my whole life._

As Chief Hotchner returned with his own cup of coffee, he nudged her shoulder gently. "Are you ready to give us an updated summary?" he murmured, handing her the remote for the display screen on the jet. Usually, if she accessed it at all, she did it from her techie lair. The stupid remote looked a lot like the remote in the situation room, but it was a different brand and laid out way differently.

She pressed the Menu button. "OK, my pretties," she said, hoping she sounded a whole lot more confident than she felt. "This is partially my own research, partially that of some of the sharpest hackers out there. This is Carissa Melton-Flynn—no, that's her mother, wait. There! _That's_ Ms. Melton-Flynn, the receptionist at a dental clinic. She had rhinoplasty seven months ago following an auto accident. She's still alive, and the idea is to keep her that way. She's cashing in all the stocks she inherited, stocks she's held on to since she was seventeen, and she's supposed to pick up the check at the broker's on her lunch hour, twelve-forty-five until one-thirty. A 'lunch three-quarters hour,' I guess."

"What makes her look likely?" asked Dave Rossi. "There must be hundreds of people who had cosmetic surgery and surely some of them are liquidating some of their assets. We're heading into the holiday season, and—"

"You speak the truth," Garcia acknowledged, "but in looking at Ms. Melton-Flynn, we've come up with a few more matches that didn't seem important before. Most critical: Four days ago, Ms. Melton-Flynn signed up to do online consumer satisfaction surveys. 'No biggie,' I hear you thinking, and you are correct. There are dozens of these outfits out there. But this is a very small outfit, and it's pretty much Midwestern-based, and—here's the deal, see, the same little outfit just signed up William Lennox a week before he died, and signed up Gloria Jessup five days before she died, and Rachel Fisher nine days before she died. And Fisher was the one who had the most problem scaring up the cash, so that might be significant.

"Anyhow, given that old _"once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action,'_thing, we have a fourth here in Clarissa, maybe what we need to say, 'this crap stops here.'"

Once she was done, she set down the remote and made her way back to the coffee pot.

"Hey, Gorgeous," Morgan whispered at her. "Your knight in shining London Fog braced me in the middle of the night."

"What?"

"Your secret protector, you know—the guy who sounds like—" Morgan paused in thought. "Do you remember the guy on _Sesame Street_, the _'Would you Like to Buy an O?'_ Muppet? 'Cause, honest to God, Baby Girl, that's what he sounds like, all whispery and confidential. I keep expecting him to, you know, flash his trenchcoat and whip out an O."

She stared at him for a few seconds, then fought a grin. Yeah, Mr. Rensselaer sounded kinda like Lefty the Letter Salesman.

"He wanted to make sure we got you to the plane OK, because he was gonna be unavailable for a while. You know, we thought he was watching those NSA guys, but he could have been protecting you, Baby Girl."

"Yeah," she said. "I hired him. And it only cost a nickel."

"A nickel?" Morgan prompted, getting into the Muppet routine with her.

"Sh!"

"A nickel?" he whispered.

She giggled. "Riiiiiiight."


	12. Settling In, However Awkwardly

A/N: As always, I own nothing here but a few ideas and an OC or two. Other than that this story occurs before the end of Season One of "Person of Interest," no particular time frame in mind. Furthermore, as the creators dribble out information about The Machine, how it works and how it communicates, this story will inevitably skew further and further into Inaccuracy Heaven. We'll all just have to live with that.

As always, a thousand thanks to Esperanta, whose skilled eye and ear consistently allow me to create the illusion that I'm someone who knows what the heck she's doing.

**Pixels in the Night**

**Chapter Twelve**

**Settling In, However Awkwardly**

**New York City: the Library**

Four of his identities worked for the same data company, faceless and all but nameless grunts who dutifully uploaded their day's coding before the corporation opened for business, which in the company's time zone, would be 10:00 AM, Eastern. Four real human beings—and Finch knew their faces and locations as well as their names—did that coding for yet another of his Russian-nesting-doll collection of software companies. From their keyboards in Texas, Maine, Michigan, and Puerto Rico, four disabled veterans dutifully uploaded the week's work to their supervisor's mailbox, from which yet another intermediary forwarded them in the correct IDs to the correct data company.

It was important to the person at his core, the person who was what was left of his true self, that every identity's job gave at least one real person employment.

Harold Finch, Servant of the Machine, checked in unobtrusively to ensure that all four of his identities had completed their assignments. One of his most trusted money managers would see to it that everyone got paid and that his shadow selves paid their taxes and showed some activity in their accounts.

He made email contact with two rather, um, unusual contacts for whom, under an assortment of identities, he performed occasional duties. Neither of them leaped at the bait, which was just as well, because when there was a number—particularly one as sensitive as this one—he preferred to have nothing else significant on his plate.

When he was satisfied that all was working as it ought to, he at last turned to the problem of Ms. Carissa Melton-Flynn.

Even rhinoplasty had not completely repaired the damage from her auto accident. Thick trails of scar tissue ran, like roads on a three-dimensional map, across her upper lip and cheek. Ms. Melton-Flynn seemed to have few close friends and no identifiable enemies. Other than the odd splurge—she had difficulty resisting a deep discount, even on something she didn't really need—she budgeted her funds sensibly and lived almost within her means.

He stared at her photograph, baffled.

He had read a bit of the profiling literature—in fact he owned two books by Agent Rossi and one by Agent Hotchner—but he found himself unable to arrange the concepts of strangling, surgery, money, and facial-slashing into any kind of cohesive whole.

He glanced over at what—_be honest, now_—was becoming his private shrine to Penelope Garcia, all confidence and brilliant colors. He might as well arrange flowers and light candles before the little display. She was at this moment on a plane bound for New York City. She'd asked for entree to La Strega Siciliana. He could, with only the slightest effort, arrange to be in the same place, in the same room as his _vectress_, his fiery temptress.

And what would she see? Certainly not the man with whom she'd engaged in devastating, jaw-dropping cybersex back in the day. No, she would see a physically damaged man, a man with no fixed identity, a man who could never ever put his mission, his service to the Machine second to, well, matters of the heart and hormones. It was impossible was what it was—only the fever dream of a man far past his prime.

And what of this group that was looking into some of the less savory members of La Strega's clientele? Once she was on the ground and hackable, he would have to make an effort to get into her work computer. It was too much to hope that she'd brought along her home computer, the one on which she'd left the Icarus Gate wide open for him, on an official FBI mission. He wished he knew more about the Bureau. He'd hacked into its shell on many past occasions, but over the past eight or nine years, their security had become remarkably robust—and now, of course, he knew the reason.

But he did still have a trick or two up his sleeve.

He wondered how much Penelope knew personally of the art of profiling. Surely, she must have access to something that confirmed to her that, yes, Carissa Melton-Flynn was in immediate danger. She did not, could not, know that Ms. Melton-Flynn's number had just come up.

Even Mr. Reese didn't yet know that. Finch had yet to—

He froze at the distant rattle of the lock, then relaxed at the familiar sound of his partner's tread ascending the stairs.

_Well, I can tell him now…._

**~ o ~**

**New York City: Approaching LaGuardia Airport**

"Got it," Erin Strauss said with something like a triumphant tone in her voice.

Hotchner mumbled something like "Hmm?"

Garcia had been eavesdropping on the BAU's bosses for the last fifteen minutes, as they flailed around in search of a workplace more dignified than one of the community rooms at the Queens motel where they would be staying. It was a problem that they didn't generally face, since they couldn't enter into a case until invited. With this one, however, they'd only been invited in—after hinting strongly that they wanted to be involved—to offer an assist on the most recent murder, which had occurred in Peru, Indiana. The Miami County sheriff had just this morning filed the official request.

And here they were, of course, in New York City, where nobody at all had invited them, in pursuit of a shadow of a potential victim, playing the percentages, on the basis of a middle-of-the-night (and all but anonymous) phone call. This was emphatically not part of the BAU's mandate, let alone its normal mode of operations.

Sometimes it scared her how much Aaron Hotchner trusted her.

(Although the _La Strega Siciliana_ thing was probably what sealed the deal. No way Strauss was about to pass on a chance to one-up one of her personal nemeses—and she had a buttload of nemeses, was anyone really surprised?—in Organized Crime.)

"Someone in Gordie's division has a task force here," Strauss said. "Vern Whatsisname, or maybe it isn't Vern. Maybe it's Warren? Warren, I think. Whatever. Last name's Donnelly. He's working a pretty big operation out of an NYPD station house, fielding something like twenty agents. Anyway, he's already requisitioned extra space, so he has two rooms, connectivity, power, twelve phone lines on hand, but he won't get the staff until the first of the month."

"Twenty?" Hotchner murmured. "What the hell's he chasing?"

"International terrorists, according to Gordie," Strauss replied. "No idea how he managed to leverage it away from DHS, but he's been at it for months, and there he is with two vacant rooms conveniently located in midtown Manhattan. How can we turn it down?"

_Must not be a very successful operation_, Garcia thought. The Bureau was huge on trumpeting its triumphs, at least internally. If Donnelly had bagged any terrorists, she'd at least have picked up a whisper about it.

The pilot's voice came over the PA system, "Seat belts, folks, going into holding pattern for LaGuardia."

Hotchner touched a switch near his seat and said, "Thanks, Ken. Great flight," like he always did as they prepared for landing.

Ken chuckled and said, "So far," like he always did.

Garcia adjusted her lap belt and closed her eyes.

**~ o ~**

**New York City: the Library**

On the lanky ex-operative's sixth frenetic prowl through the library, Mr. Finch finally snapped, "Mr. Reese! Will you kindly settle on a destination and _perch_?"

Reese shot him _such a_ _look_, then murmured, "'Perch.' says the man with the bird names," as he parked one hip on a nearby cart. Once upon a time, it had been used to facilitate the shelving of books. Now it held a fax machine scheduled for repair, and the right buttock of the former covert ops agent. "Happy, Harold?"

"Simply ecstatic," Finch said with a sigh.

"You know, I get it," he said in that whispery voice that could soothe as effortlessly as it could terrify. "Carissa meets the criteria for the serial killer that Garcia's group is pursuing. The part I don't get is why you're working with the FBI on this."

"I should think that would be obvious, Mr. Reese."

"Pretend I'm a blockhead."

_No. Resist the temptation to snark._

"There's a serial killer out there, Mr. Reese. Knee-capping him and saving Ms. Melton-Flynn will not be sufficient. He will have other individuals targeted. Three other families want and need to see him tried and convicted. Until he is arrested and prosecuted, tax revenues that you and I contribute—out of more identities than I care to think about—will be frittered away on pursuing him. I should think it would be to _everyone's _advantage if, whoever this person is, we see to it that the FBI gets custody of him."

"Point taken," said Reese. "Although technically, it'll be the NYPD that gets custody."

"_Pfft_. Details." Finch knew better than to glance up from his monitor. "I don't have access to the BAU's computers yet—they've only just landed—but they, and we, have precious little to go on in terms of the perpetrator we're looking for. I'm aware that you only slept on the train, but the sooner we get eyes and ears on Ms. Melton-Flynn, the sooner we're likely to get a glimpse of our target."

"How am I going to explain my presence when I run across members of Ms. Garcia's team? I can hardly represent myself as shadowing the agents following Garcia if she's at the Federal Building and I'm in the Village."

Finch tapped in a few more commands and grimaced at his monitor. "In that case, Mr. Reese, I would recommend that you stay out of their view. Either that, or I suppose you could punch people until the questions stop. That's worked so well for you in the past."

He could almost hear Reese's eyes rolling.

**~ o ~**

**New York City: Team HQ**

The way it broke down was that Morgan, Reid, and JJ headed directly for the Village, for Ms. Melton-Flynn's stomping grounds, to establish a presence and get the lay of the land. Garcia, Prentiss, and Rossi drove to the station house where their nerve center would be located. Erin Strauss assigned herself to make nicey-nicey with the Powers That Be at the NYC Field Office, and Aaron Hotchner assigned himself to accompany her, to ensure that her brand of nicey-nicey didn't involve anything detrimental to his Team.

Because Dave was Dave, he insisted on carrying two of her three bags of electronics through the station and into the—well, it was more of an afterthought than an annex, a rabbit warren of rooms four steps down from the main building, with walls of plasterboard and a ceiling that was festooned with loose wires and dangling fluorescent rods.

Speaking of afterthoughts, Agent Donnelly's task force of "almost twenty" was less a hunka-hunka burnin' Federal muscle than a pitiful, albeit dedicated, kludge of otherwise unassigned agents and part-timers nearing retirement. It included three civilian IT contractors—nobody from Bureau Tech Analysis had yet been assigned to the team, although two of them would be among the seven scheduled to show up on the first of next month. Until the seven made their appearance, Donnelly's "almost twenty" worked out in aggregate to five full-time and two part-time agents, and the three civilian contractor IT guys, all of whom telecommuted. The actual physical presence of his "Terrorism Task Force" was feebler than the BAU's.

As Rossi, Prentiss, and Garcia swept through Donnelly's central operations room, Emily broke away and started wandering from station to station, just nebbing around, arms crossed over her bosom and eyes moving from one tactical display to another. Dave and Penelope got the bags hauled into one of the small rooms off Ops Central they'd been assigned. Rossi began unpacking items and handing them to Garcia to arrange and connect. For someone who was pretty much technically clueless beyond basic consumer electronics, Rossi seemed to sense in which order things needed to come out. Better still, he wasn't a chatterbox. When she was getting organized, Garcia preferred to work in silence.

"I don't know what they're doing in there," Prentiss's voice said suddenly, "but they seem to be flying off in too many directions." She closed the door behind her and walked over to the table where Garcia was setting up. "And they can't profile to save their lives. Your average old lady who sits around watching crime TV shows on cable could do a better job."

"'Zat so?" said Rossi.

"They're looking at organized crime figures and bank robbers and holdup artists and crooked cops—they're all over the map with this terrorism thing, like it's an octopus with its tentacles around everything. And terrorists don't work that way. You know it, I know it. They should know it. Where'd you guys put the coffee pot?"

"It isn't here yet," Penelope told her. "We're getting a runaround from Donnelly, who needs us to know how important he and his bunch are."

Prentiss made a disgusted sound. "They're wasting time and resources. They have one guy, all he's doing is he's looking at is a break-in at the evidence lockers—the old ones, the ones for crimes back in the Seventies."

"Seventies?" Rossi echoed, his voice showing fascination. "But they're all about the _'Take this plane to Cuba'_ bullshit. They really digging back into the Cold War mindset?"

"Apparently. And like I said, their profiling is—way beyond iffy."

"Interesting," Rossi said. "I wonder what they know that we don't. Who and what are they trying to profile?"

"OK, for openers, there's this one guy in their sights, he's ex-CIA, black ops, and he's selling his services to the highest bidder, they're saying, I guess to help finance some terrorist plot, and I'm like, 'guys, you have this dude all wrong,' and—" Emily laughed. "I was suddenly _so_ unwelcome."

"You don't think he's selling his services? It's a common enough scenario."

"But the stuff he's getting involved with—low-level holdups, the evidence locker thing, a hit some woman put on her cheating husband—they're not only a total waste of the kind of mad skills one of these guys would have, but these operations are _failing!_ The whole holdup gang was killed. The hit squad got kneecapped in an elevator. Granted, each time, their target guy got away clean, but when I said, 'Listen, man, looks to me like your guy's _sabotaging_ these operations, not running them,' I was—emphatically invited to butt out."

**~ o ~**

**New York City: The Library**

He gazed with dismay at one of his screens.

_Well, that was going to be awkward._

He touched his earpiece, his connection to John Reese. "Potential problem," he said, without preamble.

"Just one?" Reese murmured back.

_Everybody thinks he's a comedian._

"As opposed to _confirmed_ problems, Mr. Reese."

There was a faint chuckle on the other end of the connection. "Breathless with excitement here, Finch."

"The, ah, the Behavioral Analysis Unit has set up shop, not at the Federal Building, but in rooms borrowed from Agent Donnelly's, er, special project."

Not much could reduce John Reese to silence, but that little bit of gossip did, for at least a few surprising seconds.

"But have no fear, I'm on it," Finch assured him, his fingers flying across the keyboard.

"I feel better already."

Finch chose to ignore the sarcasm. He selected an email client and a name, threaded his way through a few proxies to locate himself in Brooklyn if anyone bothered to trace his putative IP address, and tapped out a message.

"_Other job fell through,"_ he wrote. _"Do you have anything for me today?"_

"Baldy's here," Reese announced. "He and Shoestring are working the street. Soccer Mom's just headed into the building. Nobody I don't recognize is in on this operation."

"And that's a good thing," said Finch.

A tiny _ding_ made him tab over to his mail client.

_Somebody's a little impatient this morning._

He opened the answer to his email. _"Four new cohorts,"_ the message read. _"We have their internal connections. We need their connections to each other and the others in our study. Need it yesterday."_

"Don't you always?" he murmured at his screen, and downloaded the data.

**~ o ~**

**New York City: Team HQ**

"In here," Prentiss was hissing. "Now."

Garcia looked up from her databases to see Emily dragging Aaron Hotchner into their ops center by one arm. To her unending surprise, Prentiss hauled him over to the corner where Penelope'd set up her machines.

"Sit," Prentiss ordered, and yanked a chair out from a nearby table. The Unit Chief obeyed, but he looked baffled.

"Rossi," Emily hissed. "Over here, by Garcia."

Penelope swiveled in her chair and stared at Prentiss. Emily, unconcerned, sat on the edge of the table and looked back and forth at her teammates.

"Sorry, people," she said quietly, "but things just got a little weird here. Dave, remember the ex-CIA guy I was talking about? The one that Donnelly's group thinks is selling his skills to the highest bidder? The guy who's involved in all those criminal enterprises?"

"Sure I do," Rossi replied.

"This is also the guy," Emily continued, her attention now focused on Hotchner, "that I think is actually working to sabotage those enterprises," she said, speaking slowly and deliberately. "He profiles all wrong. And Donnelly is, frankly, an asshat.

"Now, sir," she said, more forcefully, "will you please tell Rossi and Garcia what you just told me in there?"

Hotchner eyed Prentiss speculatively for a few seconds, then nodded and looked around at the members of his Team. "I said, that looks like Jim Rensselaer, the PI who was following the same people who are following Garcia."

"Impossible," Penelope told them, flatly. "When you told me to look him up, sir, after your little—conversation with him, I did way more than that. I checked out Logan Liberty and I checked out James Rensselaer, and then I checked out all three of Logan Liberty's directors, and—well, one director had a really messy divorce a couple years ago, but other than that, the outfit's squeaky-clean and so's Rensselaer. He's technically a contractor, but he doesn't work for anyone else lately and Logan-Liberty keeps him pretty busy.

"I don't know who hired Logan to watch me," she lied—well, not really a lie, since the only identity she could give them was the handle of a hacking legend reputed to be (a) dead; (b) a fiction; or (c) in actuality a collective, and not a single person. "—some of Logan's firewalls are better than others—but it's a solid company, and I met Rensselaer last night. He seemed, you know, just—professional."

_Well, creepy. Cold. That kind of professional._

_But egedn hired him to protect me, and I trust egedn._

_I think._


	13. Working Separately Together

A/N: As always, I own nothing here but a few ideas and an OC or two. Other than that this story occurs before the end of Season One of "Person of Interest," no particular time frame in mind. Furthermore, as the creators dribble out information about The Machine, how it works and how it communicates, this story will inevitably skew further afield. We'll all just have to live with that.

As always, a thousand thanks to Esperanta, whose skilled eye and ear consistently allow me to create the illusion that I'm someone who knows what the heck she's doing.

**Pixels in the Night**

**Chapter Thirteen**

**Working Separately Together**

**New York City: BAU Headquarters**

Before Penelope could participate further in any discussion of the man who might or might not be Rensselaer, three things happened almost simultaneously. The first was that the small data company in Iowa that operated the opinion polls all the victims had filled out responded to their queries and their warrant. Among other things, they made all of their programming immediately available online to the BAU. The second thing that happened was that Morgan reported that he, Reid, and JJ Jareau were all on site in the Village, near where Ms. Melton-Flynn lived and worked.

The third thing to happen was that Agent Donnelly himself strutted into their midst, all high spirits and importance, to tell Aaron Hotchner and Emily Prentiss where the coffee urn could be found and where the best places were for takeout food.

"Better still," Donnelly said, studying something on his smartphone, "let me contribute one of my assets to your efforts."

Well, that one wasn't hard to figure out. Donnelly wanted access. The BAU had power, and his little loser operation needed more traction.

Hotchner eyed Garcia. "Would that help?" he asked with smooth courtesy, and anyone who didn't know him would think he was happy for the offer.

"That's—that's entirely unnecessary," Penelope said. What she was actually thinking was, _Not a chance, Poopy Pants._

"Oh, no problem at all," Donnelly said with a thin smile. He made another long survey of something on his phone and selected something. There was the expected series of beeps, then—on speaker: Donnelly apparently really liked to highlight his power as he exercised it—a man with what sounded like a mouth full of gum said, "Yeah?"

"Yes," Donnelly said. "Look sharp. I need you to second a visiting team today."

"But the, uh, the cost-analysis you wanted?" the contract worker on the other end said with a note of dismay. Faint Brooklyn accent, vaguely reminiscent of Ben, the IT guy who'd taken early retirement when cancer bit him in the butt. Hell, maybe it _was_ Ben. Maybe chewing gum was therapeutic.

She wondered whether there was medical marijuana-laced gum.

"Multitask," Donnelly commanded. "You're a smart boy. You figure it out."

Garcia glanced at her Unit Chief, who knew perfectly well what Penelope's usual response was to interference from outside. Hotchner nodded ever so slightly at her, silently letting her know that she was free to blow off Donnelly and everybody on his pitiful excuse for a task force, with or without a tactful smile.

She took three seconds to calculate how likely it was that any of Donnelly's retiree IT consults could break through her walls. Another two seconds to calculate how easily she could manage to crack through Donnelly's defenses, meaning a straight shot to everything the task force had, and didn't have, on the man who might be Jim Rensselaer.

She spun out her perkiest smile. "Cool!" she burbled. "You can start him on this—" She took a slip of paper and wrote down the address where the program for the opinion poll was parked. "We need an analysis of the programming architecture right away."

_That ought to keep him occupied for the day._

Donnelly read Garcia's information and request to the man, shut off his phone with neither thanks nor farewell, and beamed at Penelope. "This time next month, we'll have full in-house IT," he confided. "No more of these part-timer jackasses."

Donnelly beamed. Hotchner shrugged.

Donnelly muttered a couple more pleasantries and bustled away to his own operation. Garcia turned her back on him and seated herself, turning her attention exclusively to other aspects of the opinion poll.

"They don't solicit participants via email," she reported over her shoulder to Rossi, Hotchner, and Prentiss. "They have a pop-up ad on a couple entertainment sites where people can opt in, but they don't actively target people. So someone's using the results of the survey, but the survey itself is more than a fishing expedition for victims. The company solicits email addresses for people who want to receive information and special deals from its partners."

"And the partners?"

Garcia chased a few more links. "A step up or two up from spammers. Mostly catalog outfits, third-party—oh, hang on. They recommended some other links, depending on the replies—yeah, respondents who indicated health problems, or interest in health problems, hang on here, I may have something here. Yeah, got it. They had links to a couple support boards for people with medical concerns, look—"

"Yeah?" Hotchner suddenly barked into his phone. "Hang on. Garcia, JJ's sending you info on our potential UNSUB; that takes precedence over everything else."

Penelope opened her search software and waited, her fingers poised over the keyboard.

"Who?" Aaron growled. "What the hell's _he_ doing there? Yeah, that's the guy." Perhaps he didn't realize that at the same time that he shot the UNSUB's contact information over to her he also sent her the photo he'd just been sent—of Jim Rensselaer, big as life, enigmatic smile all over his face.

_In the Village?_

**~ o ~**

**New York City: The Library**

The tall bony one, Agent Reid—one advantage to returning to their secure walkie-talkies was that they no longer had to refer to individuals in their sights by coded references—was calmly discussing body disposition techniques with the looming, muscular Agent Morgan. There was nothing creepy or amusing or weird to it; it was just another aspect to their job. Apparently their current suspect pretty much dropped the bodies where they fell—in a bedroom, on a front porch, out in the back yard—and walked away.

On an intellectual level, Finch derived some gratification from the fact that the go-to experts on profiling were as baffled as he was as to motive. He listened as they verbally pushed the pieces around, trying to find a fit, always coming up as lost as he was. On a crime-fighting level, he was appalled. He'd hoped this bunch had more on the ball than Donnelly's crew.

"Be back," Reid said to Morgan suddenly.

Three minutes later, the same diffident, nasal voice spoke again into Finch's earpiece.

"Excuse me?"

Harold frowned. Whom was Reid addressing?

"We need to talk," the voice continued, still mild, but determined.

"This isn't a good time, Dr. Reid," John Reese replied. He was giving away his knowledge of the agent's identity for Finch's benefit, rather than his own, Finch realized.

_And he was spotted. Or he deliberately allowed himself to be spotted._

Harold glanced at the photo of the lanky multi-PhD with the messy hair and the fashion sense of a graduate assistant. Spencer Reid. Formidable intellect with hit-or-miss social skills. Mild Asperger's, most likely, although at the higher reaches of the intelligence scale, it gets to be a tricky business differentiating between reasoning styles and pathology.

"So you know me. Good, that'll simplify things. I've noticed that you aren't watching Penelope Garcia right now," Reid continued. "It's only natural that some questions should arise."

_So Morgan has made Reese from his contact with him in D.C., and he's identified him to the other members of his team. Things are getting more interesting._

Finch spoke quietly into the connection. "Your own discretion, Mr. Reese."

"We have—common interests," said Reese.

Ordinarily, Harold felt completely comfortable with only audio input from his partner, but things were just turning too weird, too fast. Dancing his fingers across his keyboard, he got access to one surveillance camera after another, until he could see, in black and white, and with poor resolution, Dr. Reid—his hands in his pockets and his body posture nonthreatening—standing beside John Reese just outside the entrance to a parking garage.

"You and I?" The academic's tone was, well—academic. Like Reese, he kept his gaze on the street, and on the entrance to the dental offices.

"Ms. Melton-Flynn," Reese said finally. "Keeping her safe until the cavalry shows up." The resolution from the camera with the best angle was so miserable that Finch had to presume from John's tone that he was smiling. "Unless you're the cavalry?"

"We're in a legally—_interesting_ position here," said Reid. "We share a nexus—Ms. Garcia—and apparently a belief that Ms. Melton-Flynn is at risk. We have no legal mandate to take action at this time."

"And I have no legal mandate whatsoever," said Reese. "But given the information Ms. Garcia and your team are pursuing, it's a reasonable assumption that—something unpleasant could happen. We don't want that."

"Define 'we.'"

Reese chuckled. "I represent a concerned third party," he said. "One who has contacts with Ms. Garcia, who considers her a credible source, and has reason to feel—protective of her."

"Her hacker friend." There was no questioning tone to Reid's voice.

"A concerned third party," Reese repeated coolly.

"Really. One moment," the agent said. On Finch's screen he could see that Jennifer Jareau—the agent they'd code-named Soccer Mom—was calling Reid. "Yes?" he said into his phone.

Because he was still bluejacked, both Finch and Reese heard both sides of the conversation.

"His name's Martin Sattler," Agent Jareau said. "Age around thirty, five-ten, brown and brown, small mustache. Thin build. Former pharmaceutical rep, now working with a medical research firm. She met him through a support board for people unhappy with the results of their surgery. He's promised her that he can help her buy her way into a study of a new drug that drastically reduces scarring. Garcia's on it, locating him. How's it going with you?"

Fascinated as he was by this dialogue, Finch nevertheless opened his data-gates wide and dove headlong into his investigation of Martin Sattler. Within twenty seconds, he was sure that it was an assumed name. There were plenty of Martin Sattlers in the United States, and not one of them met the criteria for Ms. Melton-Flynn's predator.

"Unremarkable," Reid was replying to Agent Jareau in Finch's earpiece. "I'm talking to the guy that Hotch took a swing at. He's here in the Village, watching out for Ms. Melton-Flynn."

"Really?" There was laughter in her voice. "That's kind of weirdly convenient, isn't it? Does he have, like, a Bat-signal that summons him?"

"He has the next best thing. He has a friend with connections to Garcia."

"Ah. The hacker thing."

"It's a reasonable assumption."

Like Finch and Reese, the two agents rang off without formal farewells. There had been no greeting, either, Harold realized. Their communication was based as thoroughly on mutual trust and goals as his was with Reese.

It was an interesting insight.

**~ o ~**

**New York City: BAU Headquarters**

At her work station, Penelope Garcia kept her search engines up and running and pinned all of the data for Ms. Melton-Flynn and for the man whose name was certainly not Martin John Sattler in an easily accessible place. Fake name, fake address, fake backstory, and a burner phone—the likelihood that _Martin Sattler_ was up to no good kept increasing exponentially.

"His car," Dave told her, looking at a text message.

"I'm on it," she said. "Whatcha got?"

"Red Acura," he said. "Out of state plates, she _thinks_. Maybe five years old, she _thinks_."

"My precious, you don't give me much to go on," she told him mournfully. Nevertheless, since miracles occur all the time, she began pulling up lists of cars. The uncommon color—in terms of popularity, Acura paint jobs tended to cluster toward black, silver, and white—might help. She didn't want to eliminate in-state owners right away; there might be a vanity or specialty tag that could be mistaken for out-of-state.

Low and to her right side, a dark blue box—Bureau internal messaging software—opened up on her computer. Donnelly's contract IT guy had an initial read—with more yet to come—on the underlying code for the opinion poll. He was definitely old-school—used _CYOA_ (for _choose your own adventure_) to describe the way new polls spun off from the original, for instance. He closed, pure Bureau contractor, with a timestamp, his initials—BLV—and his employee ID.

She didn't have the heart to tell him that he'd been assigned busywork. It wasn't his fault that Donnelly'd assigned him to the BAU, where he was neither wanted nor needed. Yet he had gotten back to her remarkably fast. She'd been sure that the architecture analysis would pin him down for most of a day; he'd reported back to her in just under an hour.

_Yeah, some of those old-school guys can kick it._

"I'll need more," she reported back to Rossi. "Nothing's popping out here."

Rossi spoke into his phone to JJ. Penelope turned her attention again, briefly, to Donnelly's maybe-helper, more-likely-mole.

A quick employee search confirmed that Bertram Lynn Vogel (not Ben from Brooklyn after all) had worked full time for the New York Field Office for nine years, mostly crunching numbers for White Collar Crime. He'd had a couple heart attacks and now picked up a little cash as a part-timer for Donnelly. She found his official employee ID—old, nobody'd bothered to update it in the past eight years—and saw a bland, round-faced guy with a white moustache and van dyke beard. Coke-bottle glasses.

He didn't deserve to be kicked around by Donnelly.

She just had to try, of course. A few taps, and—voilà! She was in contractor BLV's machine. She hoped his firewalls were more robust against non-Bureau personnel, because she'd had little trouble gaining access to his files, or at least his Bureau files. He'd been with Donnelly for three months, off and on, mostly performing basic searches and financial analyses. A rapid survey of his search history raised no flags; whatever he usually did for Donnelly, it related only tangentially to the hunt for terrorists.

He did, however, have two very interesting lists of names on his computer. One of them, a list of 49 names, was identical even in its ordering to the list Kevin Lynch had given her the week previously—the one with, among other things, the list of partners in La Strega Siciliana. Bert Vogel's data searches seemed somewhat similar to hers, which wasn't surprising. Garcia was damn good and damn thorough. So, apparently, was Mr. Vogel. He seemed to have missed Ms. Margolis's involvement with a lawyer who represented a known drug dealer. On the other hand, he'd found Mr. King's past partnership with an embezzler currently under investigation for doing again what he'd done so well in the past.

He'd missed the connection between Geraldo Falcone and Harold Jay and Harold Patridge, but then, he hadn't been looking for one. That had been her own investigation. Jay and Partridge weren't persons of interest to White Collar Crime.

The other list, however, took her breath away. It was ten names—the eight of them who had flown in that morning on the BAU jet, plus the pilot and copilot. Bert hadn't done anything with that list—from its timestamp she could see that he'd been sidetracked by his assignment to the BAU. That must have been surreal for him, she thought.

Another folder among the consultant's Bureau-related files was coded EVILOCKR, which at first she read as _evil locker_.

_No, not that_, it struck her suddenly; it meant e_vidence locker_. A couple clicks assured her that, yes, this was the file on the gang that had robbed an old NYPD evidence locker for items from a murder in the early 1970s. It turned out that the crime related to the early life of Carl Elias, a man very involved in organized crime in New York City. Not Seventies terrorism, she realized: modern terrorism, in the form of Carl Elias, who was engaged in a scheme to wrest power from the Russian gangs and the old-line Mafia dons alike.

Scary guy. He looked like somebody's junior high math teacher who lived with his mom and walked to school, the kind who'd never recovered from being bullied out of his lunch money. Looks were deceiving, however. Bodies were falling all over the five boroughs thanks to Elias and his small, tight-knit organization.

She watched a surveillance video of four masked men entering the outer area, where the evidence clerk sat behind wire and bullet-proof glass. Watched the clerk, the guard, and one terrified civilian—a paralegal, according to notes—hit the floor as the robbers entered. She watched the tallest of the robbers bend down and yank the civilian to his feet.

"A lefty," said Aaron Hotchner, behind her as panic shone on the paralegal's geeky, middle-aged face.

"Yup," she said.

Righties hardly ever noticed what hand a person used. Lefties always seemed to notice other lefties, as though it was a secret handshake to their club. Without even thinking about it, the lefty identifies other lefties.

Aaron Hotchner was a lefty. Penelope Garcia was a lefty.

And Jim Rensselaer was a lefty.

"Is that's him?" she whispered back to Hotchner, clicking on a digital image. "Is that the guy they think is Rensselaer?"

And there he was, unmistakably identical to Jim Rensselaer: the mystery CIA guy, the black ops specialist who was either selling himself to the highest bidder to promote terrorism (the Donnelly view) or to sabotage local criminals (the Prentiss view).

"I guess so," Hotchner replied, keeping his voice low. "Donnelly doesn't have a real name on him yet—he just calls him _the guy in the suit_—but in the CIA, he's supposed to have gone by Stewart, Price, Winters, and Reese."

Her eyes about popped out of her head.

Neutered beagle _Reese_, owned by Harold F. Jay.

Neutered cat _Reese_, owned by Geraldo Falcone.

Jim Rensselaer—no wonder he cracked up when she gave him the message about the vet's appointment!—who worked for Bob Stroud, like in Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz. Who connected her with Harold, who was VoD. Who was egedn. Which meant "bird."

And, come to think of it, so does _Vogel_.

"And that's definitely the guy you saw who was shadowing me?" she said, knowing the answer, but wanting it to be different.

"Him or his twin," Hotchner said with confidence.

"Interesting," she managed to mutter, while remaining outwardly serene as ever.

She turned smoothly back to her investigation of the man who called himself Martin John Sattler, but her brain was buzzing.

_What the hell have I brought on myself? On the team?_


End file.
